BA Season 3: 77 to 79 'Red Sands'
by The Barracuda
Summary: Season Finale Part 3 of 3
1. Red Sands Part 1: Sacrifices

Author's Notes: Sorry this one took so long, but I am tired, and sometimes when staring at the screen, nothing comes, except when I lose consciousness, lean forwards and accidentally bang my head on the monitor. I'm trying to get season 5 over and done with as soon as possible, so please bear with me, my readers both faithful and casual. And another hearty thank you to all those who sent their birthday wishes to me, the old man getting steadily older (okay, as of the 20th of March I'm only 24, but still...), and maybe the fact I was gorged on booze and birthday cake during half my spring break and worked full time the other doesn't help the ol' creative process either. Go figure.  
  
77 - "Red Sands Part 1: Sacrifices"  
  
April 1st, 2002  
It was hard, powerful rain condemning the island of Manhattan to a smeared, watery, dismal gray. Where clouds surrounded a city under siege from horizon to distant, obsidian horizon, enveloped under a blanket of thundering, primal power. In the farthest reaches of the sky, a distant lightning flickered and threatened to doom the entire heavens with sapphire flame, the air crackling with the static of electricity flashing amid the steel gray billows of the coming storm.  
  
Castle Wyvern stood just underneath the clouds, plagued by a tempest and viciously pummeled by a weaponry of water transformed into screaming, razor projectiles. The ramparts were slick with the water pouring across the stones and cleansing the courtyard and turrets, wiping away months of grime and dust left over from the cold winter sheathe of snow. It pounded and struck and drove down so relentless it was almost enough to erode the majority of original stone having survived a thousand years in such gruesome weather. An eruption of thunder rumbled across the coating of ash above, nearly touching the castle with such untamed power journeying from one side of the sky to another.  
  
And thus similar to the storm setting a blistering wound to the clouds outside, did the clan suffer within, above a city slowly descending into chaos with death and the threat of cleansing flame from those who claimed to be its ultimate savior.  
  
She reached a hand slender, delicate, but strong and stanch to the door, almost dreading the confrontation she knew to be waiting just behind this simply ornamented slab of steel. Having returned from her shift, having done her best to calm the masses, Elisa now pressed her hand to the identification pad just to the side embedded in the stone frame, and instantly, did her verification of a handprint allow her access. The door slid open, and she was forced to stare into utter darkness.  
  
She could smell him, granted the swift rush of his scent towards her when opening the sealed chamber to the rest of the castle, her body instantly reacting and her senses abruptly peaked when coming so near to him. A rustle of wings in the shadows gave presence to her husband, seated most likely in the massive chair facing the small collection of computer screens. Elisa remained in the doorframe, a slender silhouette distorted by the long leather jacket she wore, lending a light sheen when wetted by the rain. "Goliath?"  
  
An answer of oblivion and fretful silence, as nothing moved, or allowed even a reply to her summons.  
  
"Goliath, please answer." she tried again, when hearing the rustle of thick leather, a sound she knew all too well. For years she had trained herself to hear him, when awaiting his arrival to her terrace upon the eruption of dawn against the daytime sky. "Answer me damnit."  
  
He damned her sweet aroma. He damned the taste of her invading upon his own powerful, unrelenting senses and rolling a floral, and almost honeyed flavor over his tongue. His mouth watered in her perfume, for it was far too powerful to resist, especially in this small, windowless room now thick with her human pheromone. "Elisa." he forced out, the succinct, bitter response proving his place in the armchair.  
  
Her eyes were slowly adjusting, thinned and searching, and with the broken shafts of light spilling inwards, she caressed the outline of his soft, sable hair glinting from the computer screens. "We've barely spoken for a week." she whispered. "If only to make nice for Trinity to spare the fact her parents are at each other's throats."  
  
It was a voice seemingly disembodied, abrasive and growling, "Your point being?"  
  
She swallowed, and stepped inside, leaving the door open on purpose, perhaps fearful of being trapped within the darkness. With this man, and the anger he bred and forged within his heart as a deadly, volatile weapon. "You've hidden yourself away for the past week now." she continued, standing directly behind the chair, and knowing Goliath could see her with her reflection within the screens he faced. "We barely see you anymore...Brooklyn needs you to..."  
  
"I am searching for the Guild," he interrupted quickly, evading anything having to do with the clan's newest leader, "in my own fashion. And I don't need the timedancer spouting orders at me."  
  
"What about our daughter?"  
  
Goliath searched for an answer lost far from his reach, knowing in his want to escape into isolation, he may have injured his youngest daughter the most. "I have spent time with her."  
  
"What about me?"  
  
Anger folded his brow, regret, and the bonds of love weakened to the point of shattering were ultimately tested once again. But he remained doggedly silent, and merely flicked his eyes to where the shadowed form of Elisa fell into a distorted mirror image bulged out on the screen towards him.  
  
In a stillness indignantly cold, Elisa breathed a pained gasp, "So you're going to let our marriage fall just apart because of what I did?" She dug the large, arched heel of her boot into the stone flooring, slanting her hips and shoulders contrastingly to the other. "You're going to shut me out and forget eight full years of friendship and love?"  
  
"I was not the one who sided against me," his voice bordered on a snarl, rising through the depths of an imposed silence, "I was not the one who delivered the final blow and removed me from my place with a decision that almost contradicts everything you wanted."  
  
Elisa stripped away the falling layers of hair curtained on both sides of her face, straining her fingers through a fluid ebon in frustration. "My decision may have seemed like a contradiction to my greatest fears, Goliath," she explained regretfully, but resolutely, "but the clan needed to get out there, despite the risk to me...or to Trinity."  
  
"You would risk the lives of your clan, your family, your daughter?"  
  
"You didn't walk through the Central Park crime scene with two hundred and fifty charred bodies covered in sheets!" she screamed back, directing the fury of her screech towards the back of the chair, with Goliath closing his eyes in condolences to Elisa's witness of the recent P.I.T. bombing. "You didn't smell the burnt flesh, you didn't see some kid reduced to a pile of his internal organs when his flesh was burned off!" Her breath having ignited a flame towards him, Elisa calmed herself, and settled the uproar of nausea in her belly. "The clan has already done some good for this city. Within a week, they've helped the police force stretched to its limit to calm the city. They've stopped muggings, looting, robberies, probably prevented numerous deaths..."  
  
Yet Goliath minded only one singular thought, that which first spurred his toppling from a throne awarded rightfully. "And has the Guild been found?" he asked almost condemningly, his voice laced with animosity so very unlike him.  
  
"No," Elisa slowly shook her head, "but the clan is helping to keep order in a city in chaos." She crept forwards, seeing the outline of his broad, wing-caped shoulder loom into view, and her hand raised, trembling, wanting desperately to touch to the warm, leathery flesh. "That is their duty," her voice grew soft, though determined, "that is what they are."  
  
"And if you believe I have forgotten that," he spit back, when a growl heaved from deep within his chest forged a path and danced through the still, stale air, "then you are far too presumptuous."  
  
"Damnit..." Irritation sparked in the cinnamon gemstone of Elisa's narrowed gaze, as a strength of heart overshadowed any physical limitations compared to that of her mate. "I don't know why I even tried to come here and apologize! If you're too stubborn to even listen to why this happened in the first place, then maybe we shouldn't even try to fix this marriage!!"  
  
Goliath immediately pulled the seven hundred pounds of his awesome frame onto massive, arched feet sustaining such weight, and violently swiped the chair aside to better face off against his wife. He stood, grew, towered to his fullest height, his wing struts grazing across the chamber's ceiling and draped imposingly in heavy orchid suede. They unfurled with a loud snap, sending a peculiar shiver through Elisa's body, now seemingly so frail in the presence of not her husband, but a beast standing in his place. "You yourself removed me from leadership!" he roared, his eyes baring raw malevolence in the deep onyx depths. "You yourself helped to cause all of this!"  
  
"Do think I wanted to be put in that position?!!" yelled Elisa, her voice echoing through the entire chamber stifled by technology, a literal womb of computer screens and burdened hard drives cadenced in a singular heartbeat. "Do you think I took any joy in what happened last week?!! It tore my goddamned heart from my chest to go against you!!"  
  
"Am I supposed to feel sorry for you now?!" His eyes flared, from dulled black to fiery white. "Am I supposed to forget all that has passed between us and forgive you because of that fact?! I am angry, Elisa, betrayed!!"  
  
"You can feel whatever the hell you want! I deserve some of it, I know, but I won't be single-handedly blamed for all of this. I wasn't alone in my decision."  
  
Goliath's barreled chest expanded with a fortifying breath, crossing the two slabs of mountainous muscle he claimed to be his arms against it. "I am more than aware of that fact. Instead of just my wife turning her back on me, it was my second, my brother, my former mate, and my oldest, dearest friend."  
  
Snapping her head to the side followed by a wave of her hair, Elisa's lips trembled, her body welling with anger when unable to further argue her point against her husband's stubbornness. She reached inside her leather coat, and pulled out a small CD diskette complete with case and threw it towards him. It grazed past his side and skidded to a halt on the computer desk. "The coroner's report on the two baggage handlers at La Guardia last week." she whispered. "They were eaten." Goliath turned in a near ghoulish interest, yet his eyes betrayed the glacial exterior with the bare hints of fear trapped deep within an impenetrable wall of charcoal. Fear of an adversary unable to die, and unwilling to relinquish his machinations far beyond lunacy. "Brooklyn and the clan's shitting bricks over this. And so am I. This is too much like HIM." Elisa blinked once, twice, then released a shaken exhale through an ovaled mouth. "I guess you were right after all, I guess it's not the time to have another baby." she seethed acerbically, relenting to the fact he was perhaps right in the timing. That he was right to take away from her any semblance of normalcy.  
  
"Jalapena..."  
  
Thinking he was speaking of the murders, Elisa then noticed his eyes had changed abruptly their direction and intensity, burning a trail past her and towards the open doorway. "What?" Elisa turned and found that a small shadow had marred the entrance to the computer room. Tiny, winged, precious, and branded in each of their memories. "Jalapena..."  
  
Trinity slipped away, where tears had blinded large chocolate eyes and a sadness in seeing the two most important people in her young life attacking each other had been the ultimate breaking point. Her young sensibilities changed from the innocence once enveloped around her as a comforting blanket, she still could not fathom why they bickered and fought, or why their pain and hatred resonated so clearly.  
  
Elisa instantly chased after her, her long jacket billowing behind her in her wild sprint as if she had as well grown wings to lift her across the stones. A bird of prey in flight, angling closer to snatch upon her target, and just as Trinity was about to turn a corner to escape into the labyrinth of the castle halls, Elisa slid across the ground to clutch the child to her chest. "Oh no you don't, squirt."  
  
"No!!" Trinity shrieked, her lungs tearing into the air the wounded cry of a gargoyle, comparable only to her father and sisters. "No fight!! NO FIGHT!!!"  
  
And despite Trinity's unrelenting struggle, Elisa held firm to a child stronger than most, soothing her with words spoken softly and into the lush fields of dark hair. "Shhhh, it's okay, baby...it's okay..." Trinity curled her wings in around her to better hide away, as Elisa lay kisses to her cheek, drinking away the tears having run rampant across her flawless tawny skin.  
  
Goliath had traveled half the length of the corridor in the chase, though watching from some distance as his wife comforted their daughter, quieting her babbled cries choked by sobs lodged deep in her throat. His form was limp and his wings sagged behind his shoulders, his noble features fallen and crushed, as was his pride and the honor he held to for so very long.  
  
Elisa lifted her head and the couple linked their eyes, until Goliath dropped his in defeat, and turned, and walked away. "Shhhh, it's okay, Trini," she whispered, returning her attentions to her daughter, the hybrid grasping tiny, taloned hands into her shirt and resting against her soft chest, "it's okay."  
  
****************************************  
  
Through the rain-smeared backdrop of swirling clouds, infrequently lit by the arcs of lightning trawling through the depths, they arrived home. Soaked nearly to the bone, their clothing, from delicate Japanese silk to thick Scottish leather, hugged their forms and clung uncomfortably to their flesh. Under the uncompromising scrutiny of the elaborate network of security cameras and using their wings to help scatter the rain as membranous umbrella, they raced to the entrance, and burst through the door into the welcomed warmth and glowing light of the castle corridor.  
  
Allowing Shadow an entrance, Broadway pushed the thick gate closed against the winds and rain slicked into a puddle and reaching across the floor, Sata roamed her hands through the fallen, sopping strands of hair spindled through her horns and dropping a steady stream of water onto her brow. She shook her wings and rid the sails of any excess moisture, and spit into the air a muted growl, annoyed at such weather having entrapped them when in mid-patrol.  
  
"I HATE rain." Sata muttered, seeing as her kimono openly bared through the thinner sections a dulled emerald jade. An almost seductive display of flesh and sculpted, willowy curve.  
  
"Here."  
  
Her field of view blighted suddenly by a sheet of white, the samurai snatched on instinct the object thrown against her. A soft terry towel, and Sata would appreciate the gift if not given by a man whom she directed the brunt of her frustration against. "Arigatou." she whispered, running the towel over her features to entrap the water glossed on her skin.  
  
Broadway as well grasped a larger towel heaved towards him, and lowered into place a thick precipice of bone over a skeptical glare. "Playing nice for the malcontents, are we?" he bullied, as Brooklyn approached them seemingly impervious to the barb, deflecting it from a skin of steel needed to better reign in such defiance from his troops.  
  
"Funny, really funny." he shot back to a brother who had yet to fully accept his change in position, and revolved his attention to perhaps someone who would not slight him so easily. He trickled close to Sata with shorter steps, cautious, as the samurai wringed her long, raven locks through the towel. "Anything?"  
  
"No sign." came Broadway's dark tone, choosing to answer anyway. "As usual."  
  
When finished, Sata folded the towel and draped it tidily over her mate's shoulder, sweeping back the tendrils having escaped over her shoulders and forcing them back into place. "It seems an almost futile endeavor."  
  
"Is protecting lives futile, aisai?"  
  
"One week and we have found absolutely nothing." she countered coolly. "Do you still believe your insurrection was worth it?"  
  
Brooklyn crossed his arms, his own powerful physique impressive and daunting, and holding an imposing presence as mate and leader towards the displaced warrior he loved. "I wouldn't have gone through with it if I didn't."  
  
"Nor would I." maintained the ninja, his shadowed form only outlined by the beads of water dripping from muscle and protruding spur, and bouncing the light from the crystal surface. Sata gathered her face into a slight sneer.  
  
"You and I both know our presence out there has already helped." Brooklyn continued.  
  
"Or it has exposed us." Sata remained steadfast, though her voice had relented the steeled, razor edge once contained, her eyes trading the cold fire for a weak smile all but content. "We have helped many, yes, but at what cost to our clan, what cost to our family...to us." Sata leaned in and pressed her lips onto Brooklyn's cheek, curling a hand up over the other side of his face to trace nimble talons across his strong features. To bind him whilst she feasted on shocking scarlet, and relayed a message all too obvious in a kiss devoid of passion, her tearing between duty and love. "It is not just my fear of exposure, Brooklyn-san," she whispered into the crook of his neck, her voice a husky, hazardous purr, "but the fact this family just may be beyond any healing. If you'll excuse me, LEADER." She took her leave, drifting away in matronly stride, and leaving an absence on her mate all too frigid where once there lay tepid, satin flesh.  
  
A sigh released when forced to contend with his own marital plight, Brooklyn swept his gaze to Broadway. The largest of the rookery trio sometimes thought to be an oafish, burly boor, but he posed remarkable intelligence in just his eyes, and in his proud stance. "You too?"  
  
"You don't deserve that title, Brook," he handed the towel back to his kin, "and this is wrong. Something big's coming, and we need Goliath. And not someone who's never been in command before."  
  
The timedancer creased his hardened mug, his beak from tip to taper engulfed in a cynical scowl. "You yourself have been the most assertive out there, Broadway." he challenged. "Makes me think you'd be great as a second in command the way you took to the streets under my orders."  
  
He nodded, not to the gracious offer dripping with sarcasm, but to the million years of evolutionary instinct allowed freedom from captivity. "I admit, it's good to be of some help, but this is different, it almost feels wrong to be flaunting ourselves outside." Broadway's hands surfaced and rose upwards, to better mimic the vivid mental picture he would create. "Like we're flashing a big neon light pointing towards the castle."  
  
Shadow grunted, snorting a breath in Broadway's comment. "Gargoyles protect." the shinobi growled. "And we will not find those who wish destruction upon us by hiding ourselves in a castle and waiting for them to come and slaughter us."  
  
"Along those same lines," Brooklyn resumed, though his tact made up for Shadow's grated severity, "we don't let innocent humans get hurt by fear and panic erupting all around us."  
  
"Goliath knows that, and he weighed the city's need for protection versus our very survival. And call me selfish, but I don't really feel like watching Angela or anyone else die any time soon." Broadway brushed past his brother, and down into the halls, presumably to find comfort with his mate.  
  
"The soldiers are restless."  
  
Brooklyn groused a deep, hard-bitten breath with the remark having come from an adjoining passage, "Xanatos."  
  
The billionaire stepped out from his concealment, his dark suit acting as a perfect compliment to the shadows having blanketed him from view. "How does the weight of leadership feel?" he chirped, his errant grin thinning his goatee into a sharpened, sable veil of neatly trimmed hair. "Especially when half of your clan does not feel as if you should be leading." Out of all that plagued the clan, he could at least take the enjoyment of watching Brooklyn stumble in the proverbial darkness. A wicked thing no doubt, but one of the few pleasures he was granted in such a time of war and death.  
  
And in sullen response, Brooklyn grumbled, "They seem to be okay with it, the ones who sided with Goliath. But I think mostly they're doing it out of respect for him and his words to do so despite what they think of me."  
  
"It's hard to fill such large shoes, is it not?" Xanatos sneered, his arms placed nonchalantly behind his back, standing as a king in regal bearing. "Particularly when the leader you disposed of was well-loved, esteemed, and of course, legally owns the castle you lead HIS clan from."  
  
Brooklyn jumped his brow, and smiled, with Shadow simply sneering. "Let me guess, another Goliath supporter."  
  
"I wouldn't go as far as that, but it's taken me five years to get where I am with Goliath without him wanting to tear something valuable from my body." he jested, though his words holding an alarming truth, his relationship with Goliath a tenuous one built on mistrust and suspicion. "I am forced though to question your actions, especially when it's my family at risk as well."  
  
"You chose to stand with us a long time ago." Brooklyn's voice walked the edge of a snarl, and his eyes lipped with the white fire of primal rage. "And you know damn well we've given to you as much as you've granted us."  
  
"Yes, I am well aware. But the entire island and surrounding area has been scoured many times over and still, your clan," he changed the word used, only slightly, but held the emphasis intact, "has had no luck whatsoever."  
  
Brooklyn relented his attack, and decided on a new approach against a formidable opponent. "I know, but we've also done more good than harm. And you'd think with the Guild's ambition to kill all gargoyles, and even their allies no matter how remotely associated, with such tenacity, they'd attack us instantly if they knew where we are."  
  
Xanatos crooked an eyebrow, settling the lines drawn on his face into a grave cast. "Perhaps they do." he whispered. "And perhaps they are merely using this time to mobilize against you."  
  
"Against US, you mean."  
  
Xanatos redirected his gaze elsewhere, with Brooklyn watching intently his eyes having glazed over, stolen of the once clear steel. "...yes."  
  
He was acting calm, aloof even, far too detached for the newest leader's predilection. "You seem distant, Xanatos."  
  
He stiffened, but guided features relaxed and almost surprised in the accusation towards the beaked gargoyle. "Really? I hadn't noticed." He straightened the cuff on his shirt, pulling the sleeve from underneath his double-breasted suit jacket. A nervous twitch perhaps, or just a necessity to keep his appearance anxiously immaculate. "Well, if you'll excuse me, Brooklyn, I have some affairs to attend to. Please, don't try to destroy Goliath's castle in your tenure. I'm sure he'll blame me as usual."  
  
"Yeah...sure, Xanatos." Brooklyn mumbled under his breath, seeing the billionaire practically escape from the conversation with his secrets and the air of mystery he enjoyed and surrounded himself with all too damnably intact. The voted leader shored his chest, dusting impulsively the breastplate molded to the pectoral and held in place with a heavy leather strap. "That man is too damned calm." he mentioned idly, flicking his eyes to the ninja, who nodded suspiciously in return. "Makes me think he's up to something...as usual."  
  
"Up to something??" It came from nowhere, a voice led by curiosity and an entity leaving behind her a wake of anger and annoyance wherever she may roam. Freed by the golden bracelet to walk the halls alongside her captors, Nicole St. John now somehow burst into view alongside Brooklyn. "Trouble with the landlord?" she cheered, berating the leader even as his beak collapsed into a scowl.  
  
"Trying to scoop another interview, St. John?" Brooklyn seethed, turning away from the small human woman and shooing her away. "Go play with Bronx or something and stay out of trouble."  
  
But she headed him off, quick in step and steadfast in her desire, his path interrupted by her lithe form and a determination far too reaching for what her mortal human shell would perhaps survive. A quality that almost got her killed when being hunted for her very life and skin by the dark warrior. "Oh come on," Nicole nearly reduced herself to begging, "Goliath usually gave me the passing glance like he wanted to rip my head off. You I think might be different." Her brow then rose incriminatingly. "And if I'm going to be imprisoned here, then I might as well make the most of it."  
  
Rubbing his hand to his temple, Brooklyn snapped and unleashed the brunt of rage welling up as a throbbing ache in his chest, "You want a soundbite, St. John? You want some more dirt?! How's this..." He leaned in, as the reporter was forced back. "I'm facing a war on two fronts, and now have a little annoying pest crawling up my ass, and if said pest doesn't shut her mouth, stop asking so many damned questions and behave, I'm going to ensure no one ever hears from that pest again!" With Shadow almost breaking the glacial surface with a smile, Brooklyn swept away.  
  
"Is that any way to treat your prisoner?!" she screamed at his retreating form, reduced to a pout. "He's as bad as Goliath...jerk..."  
  
"Are you quite finished, St. John?" came a wild rasp from behind, sending a paralyzing chill down the reporter's spine.  
  
Nicole turned around, only to face against a massive slab of darkness inhaling from the surroundings all light no matter how bright or intense. "S-Should I even ask?"  
  
Shadow bore down upon her as if he was sizing up his prey, and he knew by the sudden aroma, a sweetened saline brine drifting from her opening pores, that she truly feared him, especially his proximity. His eyes were narrowed and rose on each side in a sharpened slant, a proud history and heritage contained within such a simple physical trait, penetrating from underneath a horned, tattooed brow deep into her own widening gaze. He traced a single bead of sweat appearing from underneath the feathered curls of hair resting against her forehead, and bared his teeth. "I don't like you." he hissed, his voice brawled from the massive cavity of his chest. "And if I had my choice in what to do with you, it would be to use you as target practice instead of allowing you to even share our home. I actually find myself wanting for another escape attempt." His breath encircled her skin and nipped at her flesh like the jaws of a beast. "To better show you what I am TRULY capable of." With a growl released and left to haunt her, he continued on.  
  
"How's the kid?" Nicole then cast her voice down the hall, reverberating in en even higher tone, shrill, and as if to cross glass it would shatter. "I mean the fetus, or embryo or whatever it is...it's now officially two days old, isn't it?"  
  
He knew she was speaking of the recent and successful conception of Delilah's child, his child, only to feed the fires ever burning within his heart.  
  
"Iliana's a good woman to allow you to throw around your sperm so freely."  
  
That served to halt the gargoyle quickly. Shadow stopped and peered over his shoulder, as Nicole held up her hands to sway whatever penance she may elicit from even allowing her breath to strum across the castle air in his presence. With the reporter temporarily cowed, the ninja vanished into the darkness of the smaller corridor, an incredible feat by his size and incredible immensity.  
  
"Damn," whispered Nicole, saved from perhaps a gruesome reprisal for yet another night, "everyone around here is so high-strung."  
  
****************************************  
  
He had moved so quickly, it was hard to keep to his rapid, erratic pace, and at last she caught him when entering a private room and corridor once banned to the winged creatures of Wyvern's past. Gliding softly through the doors as to make not a sound, she sauntered inwards into a chamber cavernous and majestic even when bathed in total darkness. The distant lightning foreshadowed the storm, filtered through the bay windows in softened, anarchic bursts, broken into slatted beams through the glass streaked by rain. It brimmed with the glutted scent of life and family, a mingling of her brother and the human he shared his life with. A reminder of what she had regained through an extraordinary resurrection, and what she had yet lost with her hesitance a thousand years ago.  
  
He stood a lonely vigil near the window, arms crossed and a breath so heavy it was heard even over the outlying thunder and the rain against the walls. An angry stance, his wings had flared, his shoulders heaved in tempo with his chest from a fiery, guttural breath, and she approached cautiously. He must have known by his powerful senses she was here with him or perhaps his anger consumed him wholly and smeared the edges of the world outside his own private pain.  
  
She reached out to him, the lavender flesh quivering and pulsating, with the smallest of striations of muscle rippling in a temper stretched to the limits, brought on by fatigue and the aftermath of yet another battle tolling a near catastrophic cost. Her small hand teased the air tentatively the air just above the skin, the warmth exuded so thick as to have a sensation all its own. She eventually touched to him, eliciting a sudden tremor to her intimate contact, but he yet relented and allowed her to soothe his broad shoulder with a gentle rake of her talons. "Another argument with your mate." she presumed aloud, drawing with her talontips four trails across her backside, for only in solace and plutonic comfort was she allowed to ease his pain.  
  
Forced to love from afar. And forced to fend off the call of mating when besieged by the sweet scent of pheromone of the breeding season.  
  
Goliath swallowed a breath gruffly, closing his eyes to the subtle pleasure his sister offered. He knew it was she. By aroma and contour and a unique bond he knew it would be her, if not Desdemona or Angela, to come to him when he needed support. "My sister." he answered broodingly, grappling still with the anger from his exchange with Elisa. "Yes, you are right. Yet again, Elisa and I are engaged in some war against each other."  
  
"Is this from her vote to dispose you?" she asked of him, coming around to his side, her hand yet to leave his skin.  
  
"It is from everything, the attacks, my decisions, our family..." Goliath closed his eyes and kneaded a furrowed brow, and the lost sister found his pain far too evident to ignore. "It seems as if we are standing on either side of some great chasm, and I have no wings to fly to her. I am powerless to make everything right once more."  
  
"And yet," she reached up to run a hand over his ridges, to both alleviate his pain and satisfy a burning want, "there is something else you hold within you."  
  
"It is nothing." he evaded quickly, pulling away from his sister's hand.  
  
"No, there IS something, and you must release it before it destroys you, or forces you to act rashly."  
  
Goliath closed his eyes, his wide shoulders wilting and his wings growing heavy. "I find myself, for the first time in two long, wondrous years...questioning our marriage."  
  
She simply nodded, and swayed his fears, "Matings are never perfect, but do you think she actually meant to hurt you?" Stepping closer, she studied him intently, and the ardent charcoal reflecting her radiant pumpkin skin. "She is perhaps more like you than you realize. She is someone who always stands up for what she believes is right, just like you."  
  
"But..."  
  
"But." she interrupted, a smile strikingly infectious spreading on a small, pouting mouth, with lips like dark ruby. "But you were hurt, yes, you were embarrassed, and your pride was wounded. I understand." Her hands had somehow made their way to his chest, the erratic breath calmed and the fire kindled like a blast furnace now tempered. "Elisa chose to follow her instincts and do what she thought best, even if it meant going against the man she loves more than anything. Like Brooklyn and the rest. And even though you were hurt by those actions, you must let it go. You must act like the leader I believe you are, and continue on."  
  
The great creature not unlike a human but so radically different in appearance merely shook his head and released a sigh. A slight chuckle escaped unwontedly through pursed lips, even through the rage simmering just beneath a barrier adamantly private. "How do you know me so well?" he spoke clearly, his voice more akin to intelligence and humanity than most of those two thousand feet below.  
  
"I know you, brother, for we have shared much in our life."  
  
He nodded to mimic an earlier gesture, where his mouth flattened somewhat in the best version of a smile he could give. "And I am...glad you are back in my life, my clever sister." Goliath whispered, with the young gargess smiling in the compliment given without any indecision. "I have truly," he brushed a few fingers through the strands of dark, mottled blond, addictingly silky, her scent inviting, "missed you."  
  
She leaned against his chest, craning her neck to better drown in the alluring darkness that was his eyes, and in the sealed womb of clandestine pitch, far from anyone intruding, they drew even closer and embraced.  
  
****************************************  
  
They were many. They were whole. They were strong.  
  
Truly massive in number and clad in dark clothing, where only the mottled, multi-hued flesh outside of the dark textile gave any color beyond the barren black of their uniforms, they stood to attention. Resembling unassuming, modern dress suits, they were stronger, thicker, made of resistant Kevlar and pocketed within the dark fabric lay their lethal and brutally unsophisticated weaponry. The entirety of the Guild were gathered into the largest hangar, and directed a collective, hungry gaze above to a single catwalk stretched from wall to wall. There were hundreds, nay, even thousands of them, without a space left upon the steel flooring to wedge yet another member into the crowd.  
  
He took his place above them, leaning on the precarious iron railing to better watch over his kingdom built from the ashes of a ruined experiment, of a dream not yet fully realized. He was known only by a simple moniker, his striking features aged and lined by streaks of sterling in his hair and goatee. He was Mr. Black, and to some, it was a laughable pretense, suitable not for the leader of an organization that promised raw power and godlike intentions to wipe any species away that did not conform to their concept of normalcy. "It's time." he announced clearly, his deep voice floating above the crowd, and drawing an awed hush to his words. He was neither rushed nor nervous in his speech, only absolutely sincere. "This is what we have gathered for, what we have given our time, and for some of you, your very lives for. We are about to test fate and enter the lion's den."  
  
An enormous screen flickered into use on the near wall, and the crowd turned slightly to peer unto the image projected above them. Where the stars aligned themselves into a protective stance about the cold-riveted spire that pierced the heavens by one man's resilience and insatiability, and that which housed and bred the most fantastic of creatures beyond even that of heaven or hell.  
  
"It was named castle Wyvern by the ruling Scottish family who constructed it on the cliffs facing the Atlantic Ocean." he continued, his eyes deep and unreflective of the flickering screen, so dark and dismally gray they devoured the light. "It now sits atop the Eyrie building, where the clan of gargoyles roosts, and where our attack will commence." The screen changed, and flipped through an entire three hundred sixty degree revolution around the castle structure, where shadowed ramparts held behind the fitted stones a clan of beasts cloaked in wing, tail and devil's horn. "We must take the fight to them, as firing any weaponry towards the castle will undoubtedly place any innocents in danger from falling debris or structural damage to the building itself. This is a surgical strike, get in, kill the beasts, get out." A series of schematics overlaid the image, showing the internal plans of the castle made public by Xanatos years ago, perhaps to boast his newest purchase. "We've had Wyvern under surveillance for some time now, and as far as we can tell, there are no outward defensives save for a sophisticated network of security cameras. In the last week alone, we have witnessed almost twenty different creatures flying to and from what seems to be their home, including the large one dubbed the shadow."  
  
The viewscreen flashed through the blurred pictures of each gargoyle in almost frightening physical detail, the Guild's surreptitious observation impressive, and deadly to those they watched. "They are strong, resilient, lethal." Black spewed half-truths, and allowed them the worst side of the gargoyles, his own opinion almost grown into an adamant creed taken to heart by his followers. "And they have no qualms in slitting your throat with their claws, I myself have seen it firsthand. If you hesitate in killing one of them...you die." He shut off the screen, for he wanted his image, his very voice to be the lasting sound that dominated their memories, and guided their hands, which became his hands, in their quest. "This is the culmination of everything we have fought for, the cleansing of creatures and their allies who would so willingly spread themselves into our city and cause such destruction." he was speaking of a personal pain now, his past bloody and his family taken by familiar taloned hands. "This is a war for our species' very survival, against an evolutionary process that granted humanity with superior intellect and the ability to reshape our own destiny, but cursed us with the demons from our very mythology. Our sources indicate these creatures are spreading, and have been sighted all over the planet. England, Japan, China, Mexico, Russia...the list is extensive and their reach is vast. But tonight, we take back our city, then our world, and we set right evolution."  
  
The stadium lights suspended from the ceiling opened up the hanger beyond him, to alight the steel chariots they were to ride into battle, five massive, raven-painted helicopters perched behind him and flanked by two smaller attack vehicles, holding on each wing bundled missiles and gatling guns. "We remake this world for humanity alone, we make it whole once more. United." Black lifted with his hand a mask, black, and conformed to fit perfectly to his features. He placed it to his face, the mask just covering his eyebrows, curving down on the line of his cheekbones and rounding down under his chin, and it sealed to the skin with a hiss. Almost featureless, and aggressively bare, with only two white eyes glowing from the darkness. "Saddle up," a last order given, his voice filtered mechanically through three breathing slits on each side of the mask, "and Godspeed to you all."  
  
A triumphant cheer erupted through the crowd, spreading like fire to even the most fearful of Guild members with their chance at last to fulfill their mission. Those chosen to be the attack squad donned their masks and started towards the helicopters, five Sikorsky MH-53H troop carriers, and a pair of AH-66 Comanche Warriors, the finest of American weapons technology now carrying a force of over three hundred soldiers, the best trained, and the deadliest of fighters.  
  
The roof above them shuddered above the girders crisscrossed into an unbreakable frame, and with a thunder rippling down the metal walls to rival the coming storm outside, it split into two doors and lethargically slid open to reveal a slim crack of night sky. The ceiling moved away, where the veins of lightning weaved and frolicked through the clouds in a game known only to the tormented cries of nature. The rain dripped through from the ceiling's bared edges and surged a near blinding sheet into the hangar bay, dancing across the helicopter's sleek hides. The air was thrown mercilessly around the helicopters by the rotors powering up, reciprocating a fury all its own against the growling squall pressing down upon them heavy rain and powerful winds. The vehicles lifted one by one into the sky, technology versus nature in the rightful claim to the skies as the mantle of cloud enveloped the helicopters into its swirling grasp.  
  
Their path was chaotic, the pilots fighting against the weather and the storm almost on top of Manhattan, but their direction was a straight line unwavering, that of the tallest building in the world.  
  
****************************************  
  
The church was silent, and deathly still, save for the callous laughter of rain spattering across the rising spires and bell-tower of the rooftop, and over the stained-glass windows, each transformed into smeared canvases. The shadows loomed, brought to life by the candlelight, and spurred into a waltz across every surface with every touch of wind that crossed the tiny flames. He trawled through the lavish decoration, sparse, but comforting and simplistically striking to any visitor to the refuge. He felt uneasy though, as if what skin remained on his mutated form would crawl and shiver with the blessed remnants of human religious history. It reeked of humanity, and wood and burning candlewick, and varnish, and he found himself denouncing his superior senses if only to be spared the lingering fragrance of sweat and musk and a fusion of perfumes left to hang in the air.  
  
He hated this, he loathed being entrenched in the very nesting grounds of humankind for so long without allowing the human filth to burn within the dry fires flowing through his veins. But he knew only patience and prudence would allow him access what he sought for so long. And thus, he calmed his dementia for an intellect, and he sated his desires for another time save for one consuming thought, biting his tongue to ward off the hunger.  
  
The building around him at least provided a protection, a sanctuary perhaps from all that which teemed with human life around him, and he now held this place as his own, stolen from the solitary watcher. He lumbered close to the figure held up without mercy for comfort, feeling his tattered wings bouncing on the bony, armored plates on his back with each step. He drifted close, and bathed his captor in the gnarled shadow that was his alone. She was delicate, frail, and bound from a rafter arched between the louvered support columns, hanging from chains wrapped around her wrists in morbid similarity to the carved effigies of the lord's son surrounding them.  
  
"Wake up, human," he growled into her scarred face, as the woman mumbled and rose from the depths of exhausted slumber, "it is time, and you are at last needed."  
  
Her eyes ebbed, her only refuge of dreams washed away and stolen from the heated breath swathed against her skin. She mumbled under her breath, a slurred language brought on by fatigue and hunger, and nearly imperceptible. She lifted eyes up to a barely humanoid shape of bulging muscle held together by bony plates and protrusions erupting from the sinew colored in blood and scarlet. Up the plated chest she roamed her blurred, tired gaze, and upon a face appearing almost as a skull, where inside the deep-set sockets two dark, burning eyes glared upon her.  
  
"You ARE a wretched creature, aren't you, human?" he whispered, stroking a claw over her cheek, where the flesh torn away by fire provided a slightly rougher texture to his more precise sensation of touch. "Burned, scarred, bereft of beauty to any man. In the most disgusting of similarities, we are perhaps alike, but where as my damaged form actually allows me greater strength, yours only bestows pity and mercy from those more attractive than you." The mutated gargoyle breathed a malicious laughter between the jagged, wildly spurred skull's separation into his mouth. "I would feast upon you, human," he warned, as the woman flinched in terror when he grazed his teeth and tongue over her exposed skin, "but right now you are far more valuable to me as a lure to attract my prize. A shame..."  
  
"...they'll...stop you...demon..." she managed just barely, her voice weakened from malnourishment, her throat raw from lack of water.  
  
Her rebellion sparked a mischievous flame in the dark tarn of obsidian surrounded by pallid, ocher-tainted bone, enjoying her strength to continually defy him. "Such strength of soul." he applauded the resistance she offered after almost a week at his mercy. "Such passion from an inferior species. I knew I chose well when deciding to house myself in this decrepit church. And imagine my surprise when discovering you knew of clan Wyvern...what a perfectly vicious little circle. But as for your friends, they are fractured, and I hope according to my inside source, far too gone to mount a suitable defense." He forcefully clenched a hand around the nun's throat, cutting off her air supply and dropping her jaw in a slacked, silent plea for mercy. "But at the moment, I am only interested in one of them, the very foundation they depend upon, even if he does not currently lead them. Your usefulness shall at last begin, sister."  
  
He wrenched her from the chains and dragged her across the floor by her neck to where a computer monitor station lay awaiting his commands. A recent addition to his temporary home, it had already served him many times in communicating outside of the church. He pulled the human woman up and threw her onto the heavy oak table holding the sophisticated equipment so out of place, releasing her to fight for the sweet embrace of breath from a bruised throat. He held her still with a hand clasped to the back of her neck, effectively pinning her to the table and ceasing any struggle the exhausted nun had left to give.  
  
She spit, she wheezed, she gritted her teeth. But stolen was her strength to fight back, and instead, she spilled a lone tear over the veneer surface in her frustration and fear.  
  
"Stop struggling," the gargoyle hissed, his power enough to shatter the spinal cord and crush her neck with a mere twist of his wrist, "or I will remove a body part. I only need you alive for but a moment, but the agony I can put you through until then may convince you to behave." With the woman's forced silence, he powered up the computer station, and used the modem access to tap into the phone lines, and make a call. As the number dialed into the system, Sobek pressed down just that much harder to elicit a cry of pain from the nun entrapped underneath his claw. "You will serve me well, human, to bring to me my prize. I am restless, and wish to play..."  
  
"...Eyrie Building..." a voice then answered, most likely the security guard manning the foyer desk, and projected clearly over the communications system speakers. "...How may I help you?..."  
  
"David Xanatos, please." he spoke in a dulled, soft tone, unworldly, and not like the monster his mutated form presented forth.  
  
"...I'm sorry, but it's past business hours. Is this urgent?..."  
  
It appeared almost as a smile, creasing bone and exposed muscle, a chilled grin that ran as malevolent as the fires of hell. "Very. Just tell him...it's an old friend."  
  
****************************************  
  
"You're sure about this, Mother?"  
  
The hologram appeared to flicker slightly, as if reading through her findings once again. "Yes," she answered, floating across the stones beside the new leader, "though my sensors are slightly impeded by the storms." She powered another set of screens perched onto the technology seeping from the ceiling. "There are several aircraft heading directly towards us, from the southern tip of Long Island. Roughly twenty three minutes away."  
  
Brooklyn's features fell immediately, when the small burning sensation hidden beneath his breastplate, there since his move from second to leader, now became as a maelstrom twisting his ribcage and sending a shiver through his arm touching to the keyboard. He dreaded this from ever arising, and just maybe, being proven wrong. They had perhaps found the clan, this being far too coincidental to pass off as routine air traffic perpetually blemishing the skies and tearing thunder in a rippling clap over the island. And now it was heaved upon his shoulders to deal with, but he took the weight in stride. He had no choice but to. He was voted from the majority to lead them, and he had willingly taken that massive, empty throne still warmed from the previous occupant.  
  
He continued watching the screen as if it had mesmerized him, the radar layout Mother provided showing a small collection of blips guiding themselves ever closer towards the shores of Manhattan and the Eyrie. Brooklyn's beak curled, as did his tail, and he unconsciously dug his talons into the desk. "Mother...assemble the clan."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Maria, we canna leave it like this..."  
  
The bedridden captain turned away from him, and tried her best to disguise the sobs coughed out in sputtered breaths. "Brooklyn's called for you, Hudson. Just go."  
  
Hudson reached out hesitantly to brush a large, comforting hand over Maria's shoulder, but she violently shrugged it off when it grazed past the sleeve of her hospital gown. "Maria, I did what I had to...please..."  
  
She immediately threw herself around and aimed at him eyes sheltered by tears rimming the edges of her swept, dewy lashes. "You sold out your leader, your friend, because you wanted revenge!!" she screamed back, her voice a piercing yelp ripped from her throat. Hudson was forced back by the power of her screech, and the contortion of her features into a spiteful mask not her own. "But I guess it's my fault for ever believing you could make that promise to me, that you wouldn't risk yourself or your clan for some sort of stupid, pointless vengeance."  
  
"Nay," he fought back, "it was for th' better of th' clan. It was t' take matters into our own hands an' find those who took our baby before they be hurtin' anyone else."  
  
The droop of her mouth showed she believed otherwise, and she crumpled back into the bedding. "I hope you understand what you did with your part in the voting." she whispered painfully. "I don't think I can never trust you again. Trust you to be the strength I need."  
  
"Maria..."  
  
She rolled over and burrowed into the sheets, using the darkness surrounding her as cheated comfort. "Please...j-just go..."  
  
His tattered wings drawn limp to his sides, Hudson nodded and slowly padded away towards the infirmary exit, his great hearing tormenting him with the muffled sobs of the woman he loved, and in some small way, betrayed.  
  
****************************************  
  
Brooklyn turned from the hologram to where the entirety of the clan had now gathered, circled around him and awaiting the purpose of their brusque, uninformative summons to the media room. He filled his lungs with a breath long and drawn out to better calm his nerves, in seeing the condemning glares passed to him by the supporters of Goliath, but he waved them off, deciding instead to concern himself with the moment at hand. "Mother has detected several aircraft heading straight for us." he started, forcing the issue to become greater than any petty bickering between the two factions subconsciously dividing the clan. "It may be the Guild, we don't know for sure, but maybe somehow..."  
  
"Perhaps somehow they have found us." finished a new voice, deep, angry and seeming to burst from the shadows. "Perhaps they were drawn to us with our exposure."  
  
"Well, Goliath." Brooklyn greeted the last of the clan to the media room, with Elisa noticing Goliath's demeanor having radically changed, and relieved she had left Trinity in the care of Fox, far from where the tiny hybrid could see her father become a vessel malformed by hatred and anger. "How nice of you to finally join us."  
  
The lavender giant tramped into the room, an apprehension well deserved by flaunt of a bulging stature and restless, turbulent mannerisms. And behind him, the lost sister, appearing to sweep back hair tussled and out of place, her cheeks rather blushed to Elisa's keen notice. "My apologies, we were...detained."  
  
"You know, Goliath, I've been patient all week," growled Brooklyn bitterly, "but I'm getting sick of your refusal to even listen to me, especially when your defiance helps to place lives in danger."  
  
"I believe the greatest danger is the man now in control of the clan."  
  
Spurred on by the promise of a fight, Brooklyn lunged forth to argue further, but spared were they both by yet another visitor to the room.  
  
"Goliath," intruded Xanatos, entering through the arched doorway and wedging himself and a shaken voice into a coming verbal brawl, "there's a call for you." His face was pallid, almost white, and those who noticed were in awe of what could frighten him so much, what could melt the glacial ice. Goliath angled up a browridge, a curiosity in just who would be calling him now, and with Xanatos' downtrodden features, he knew it to be serious. "I believe you should take this, Goliath..."  
  
"Mother," Goliath moved past Brooklyn and towards the massive, yawning screen facing the clan from across the room, "please route the message to the main screen."  
  
It flickered to life with the computer sentience's command, and in full view of all watching, came a narrowed facade of serrated, starched bone molded into a skull, with the brow spurs of a gargoyle rising in a familiar if not twisted crown. Burrowed into the skull-shaped bone and beneath a thick, vaulted brow the hollows held soulless eyes that smoldered with malevolence.  
  
Goliath heaved his chest, a grated purr swelling into a growl and rolled over protruding lips, "Sobek."  
  
"Oh man," Lexington cringed, as did the others upon the result of Sobek's mutation from conflicting magicks, "what happened to his face?"  
  
"Hello, Goliath," he swooned, feasting upon the lavender giant's expression, a peculiar melding of disbelief and fury, "it's...so good to see you again."  
  
"I see you somehow squirmed your way from the rubble, psychotic."  
  
Sobek cricked his neck, the exposed muscle of his body glistening, bulging repulsively with arteries and veins threaded throughout the sinew pulsing with every beat of his heart. "Yes, you buried me alive, Goliath," snarled Sobek, the smile lessening some when refreshed of the memory of having a thousand tons of rubble crushing his body for almost six agonizing months, "that serves to IRRITATE me. And thus I will destroy humanity and remake the entire world for gargoyles etcetera...I'm sure I've bored you with such a tedious declaration before." A low cackle made greater when fed through the speakers rumbled across the floor, touched each of the clan with a cold swipe. "But this time is different, I never thought I would lower myself for the unsophisticated initiative of revenge, Goliath, but the fact you continually ruin such well crafted plans is starting to get tiring."  
  
"Get to the damned point, psychotic!" Goliath snarled, with Elisa sidling close to her husband, the very voice of Sobek raising a trail of goosebumps across her flesh. "What do you want from us now?!"  
  
"Not the rest, Goliath...just YOU." To prove his intentions, Sobek clenched his talons around the back of his captive's neck and raised her in view of the communications camera, knowing she was full and well displayed onto the Wyvern viewscreens. "I want to play a game..."  
  
Never expecting to see the caretaker from his childhood spent in the orphanage in the clutches of a psychotic, and hell-bent for the annihilation of his species, Todd's eyes exploded open, his breath stuttered, "R-Rose?"  
  
"The rules are quite simple, Goliath." continued Sobek, closing his hand only slightly to exert tremendous pressure on Rose's neck.  
  
"Let me guess, if I don't come, you'll promise to kill her. How original." Goliath spit, unimpressed by a ploy used far too many times. "I thought perhaps you would learn something new when buried underneath the Egyptian sands."  
  
"Ah, but here's the twist..."  
  
****************************************  
  
A quick snap of leather and the cleft of a steel blade being unsheathed sent a shiver through the weakened nun, as Sobek's long, curved sword gleamed ominously before her gaze. He teased the sword's tapered edge down her chest, the blade sharp enough to graze a slit in the dark robes with the lightest of touch, and eventually stopped when reaching her stomach.  
  
Rose could only watch as Sobek pressed the blade through her garment and into her flesh, but drew to a halt, a few beads of blood bubbling around the sword as a warning all too real. In the face of death, her only thought now was of the peace at long last she would be granted, and the one person she gave up what little fragments of her life she once had for. Her son. "May god have mercy on your soul." she whispered, as Sobek constricted his hand around the saber's handle.  
  
Sobek only smiled in the prayer. "Praying for me won't do any good, human, for you see..." One quick thrust, and the sword cleaved through Rose's midsection almost too effortlessly, the human speared, and drawing a sharp breath with the foreign object having torn into her belly and out her back. Sobek wrenched her close and grazed his fangs delicately over her earlobe, and whispered, "I have no soul."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Rose..." The gurgle of blood rising in his caretaker's throat shot through him like a bullet at point blank, a wound far worse than any physical blow, and Todd leaped from his place with wide eyes, streaked unwittingly with wetted trails cascading down the sides of his face. "ROSE!!!" he screamed in sheer horror, seeing the sword being pulled out from Rose's stomach with a scraping of steel over bone and a gruesome suckling sound of air rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the gaping hole in her flesh. "YOU FUCKING BASTARD!!!"  
  
The gasps escaped from the clan coalesced into a singular pained wheeze, a strike against them all when an innocent was felled, and Goliath spawned from his chest a growl rising from the depths of a soul both tortured and frayed at the very seams. His eyes exploded in white fire, his wings unfolding and rising in a livid, predatory stance. He was beyond what rage he could ever summon, beyond lunacy, and beyond caring of any consequence. "Sobek..." he snarled, his entire body trembling.  
  
It had happened almost immediately, his carefully guarded emotional barrier had finally fractured and let loose a surge of animal fury, transforming a lover and father into an engine of vengeance and destruction.  
  
****************************************  
  
The Egyptian held his hand to Rose's throat and in full view of the computer camera, watching in gruesome curiosity death claim another of this brittle species, the fatally wounded nun spewing streams of blood from her mouth and from the holes torn through her entire body. It pooled onto the floor, a growing slick of black fluid tinted scarlet and candlelight orange. He then whirled around and tossed the human away, hurling her down the carpeted aisle between the pews and towards the doors leading outside. She never touched the ground, the force of Sobek's throw so great, and she collided with the heavy wooden doors. Her body used as a battering ram, she was thrown into the outside, where above the storm raged and dropped a violent flow of warm, charged water upon the city. Like a limp rag, she tumbled down the sweeping stairs of concrete and at last came to rest at the bottom, the gutter, where a rolling stream of rainwater fused with her own blood threatened to drown her if the injuries sustained did not kill her first.  
  
It had been six days too long, as he tasted delicious metallic on steel in his triumph of the kill, though a simple one, and it was a sweet tang he savored slipping down his throat. The mutated gargoyle ran his tongue over the length of his sword and then sheathed it through his belt. "One down," he crowed, "one and a half million to go."  
  
****************************************  
  
"SOBEK!!!" Goliath screamed, the spacious room echoing an agonizing howl which bowed out the very walls, his great power of lung and ferocity sending the potency to shatter glass through his mouth and fangs. Todd stood behind, hunched over and near crazed, any words or actions lost to a narcosis spread through his body. Annika clutched to him to keep him from collapsing at her feet, and spilled to his clothing a wetted stain pouring from her eyes.  
  
"If you and you alone don't come now, I will kill every single human infesting this island." continued Sobek, appreciative of the silent audience he performed for, as if feeding upon their shock and anger. And he knew they would not doubt his intentions, no matter how deranged or outlandish his claims. "Come to me, Goliath." He raised his hand and gestured towards the disposed leader. "Come and play."  
  
Goliath thrust a hand through the monitor, relieving the image of Sobek in a flurry of blue flame flared from the smoking pit. "YOU ARE MINE, DEMON!!!" He swept away from the shattered screen, and pushed his way through a crowd determined to stop him towards the nearest window. Without even a passing thought to property damage or the price of his flesh against the razor sharp shards that would most assuredly fill the air, the massive gargoyle leaped through the towering bay window, erupting a wild spray of glass around his silhouette taking flight.  
  
"Goliath!! Don't!!" Elisa called out after the retreating shape in the sky, but any cry thrown against the winds buffeting against the castle walls was scattered, and instantly swallowed in the warbled applause of thunder. "It's a trap..."  
  
"Damnit!" yelled Brooklyn, as the smaller shards of tempered windowpane settled onto the ground, a breach but small in the defenses of Wyvern to hold it's own against the great beast laying siege to the sky. "This is all we need, Goliath going halfcocked against an immortal. He'll need help..."  
  
"But Sobek said for Goliath to go alone," reminded Desdemona, fearful to cross the Egyptian's fanatical orders lest he retaliate, "or he would kill the entire population of Manhattan."  
  
Brooklyn nodded. "I'm well aware. Broadway, Shadow, Othello, follow hi..."  
  
"Brooklyn." Mother interrupted, tying in the computer room's radar sensors to the remaining, smaller media room screen to the side. "Aircraft trajectory confirmed. They are on a direct route to castle Wyvern. Five cargo helicopters, flanked by two heavily armed, military issue attack vehicles. ETA in seven minutes."  
  
The clan went silent, as Brooklyn's features turned almost desperate, his lowered brow darkening his eyes and obscuring the true fear that welled within the charcoal pupils. "Then it's confirmed."  
  
"Looks like your little uprising wasn't even needed, eh Brook?" Broadway hissed towards him, the greatest irony being conceivably that no leader was truly right. "How embarrassing."  
  
The beaked gargoyle growled back, "Don't test me, Broadway." He took the floor to address them. "All right, new plan. Everyone stays here."  
  
"Good plan." Elisa shot back, skipping past him and ensuring she had a full clip in her gun. "But I'm going after Goliath."  
  
"And I'm going after Rose." Todd said defiantly, clearing away his temples of the tears, fear mended by deep loathing, and an anger strange and never before felt, spreading from his chest into the rest of his body. Like fire through his veins, it now boiled his blood.  
  
"Sobek is not to be taken lightly, Elisa." Brooklyn warned curtly. "You need..."  
  
"You just do your job!" seethed the detective swathed in long leather. "Protect this clan, and my daughter."  
  
Brooklyn could only nod in agreement, "Watch yourselves. If this is the Guild coming after us, then we can't give you any backup."  
  
Elisa stopped and turned, and it wasn't anger or pain that guided such strong, tempered eyes, it was the unwavering faith in her husband. "Goliath won't need any."  
  
He watched them leave and shook off the nagging voice buried in the back of his skull, knowing he had to weigh a single clan member against the rest. Perhaps one life for many. "Okay, people, it seems the Guild may have brought the fight to us." he called to them, as they rose and circled around their leader. "Right now, I don't give a damn if half of you think I shouldn't be leading you, because we have bigger things to worry about..."  
  
On the screen beyond, the seven blips crept ever closer.  
  
****************************************  
  
He battled the storms. As an instrument of nature himself, he let no force stop him or impede his path through the lightning streaked skies. Even as the heavens were split open all around him, he could hear only the primal pounding of his heart, rushing through his ears in a maddening cadence. It was the thrill of the hunt, the promise of bloodletting reversing an intellect back several thousand years to an ancient being led by instinct alone. Goliath flew with a speed never before attained, the rain dripping from a form made sleek, his wings holding aloft seven hundred pounds of pure lavender fire.  
  
He aimed himself towards the area of Manhattan where the church lay, an older neighborhood not too far from the Eyrie building, especially at Goliath's great speed. And through the downpour, his keen eyes spotted a blurred structure aiming its majestic spires towards the sky, almost swallowed by the industrialization surrounding the vulnerable building and it's dying neighborhood. And in the sporadic flashes lighting the world with its brilliance, he found the shapes becoming more distinct, and atop the belltower the cross, and what seemed to be a figure perched precariously upon the tip and riding through the storms untouched. And waiting.  
  
Sobek.  
  
Even with the mutation having significantly altered his form, he knew, by the stance and smell and damnably jackal-like smile, he knew. Goliath's heart empowered by pure hatred and the thirst for blood to sate that of the innocent slain, he pressed on, his eyes laying a streak of ivory fire to the skies brighter than any lightning, and pulled his wings in closer to descend at breakneck speed.  
  
Appearing as some gruesome angel having been relieved of its skin, Sobek spread his arms and wings to welcome his adversary, a challenge issued to match against the core of his lunacy, and allowed Goliath to meet him head on. And any lesser being would have been ripped in two by the force and speed behind Goliath's savage attack, but Sobek took the blow with yet another smile. Goliath collapsed his broad shoulder into the Egyptian's midsection and folded Sobek into his arms, the brunt of the dive transformed into pure kinetic energy. Goliath took him down and trampled him into the church roof, upturning shingles and decorative embellishment as Sobek rolled across the rooftop. Goliath flipped to his feet and followed the toppled creature, his eyes devoid of any presence or sentience, only an animal driven by a single thought.  
  
Goliath leaped on top of the recovering mutant, and drove his fists into Sobek's chest, throwing all he had against the armor plating. Sobek immediately threw up the blood from compressed lungs, a wracked, maniacal cackling only spurring on Goliath's assault. He did not care about the immortality spell at all, only to beat the demon into submission, to heap upon him the sum of all his rage and hatred and pain and fear. In this instant, Goliath became more than he was ever capable of, and that tainted the light of his soul. "You are nothing but a curse!!" he snarled, his voice above a roar, rending the air and bellowing over the clouds breeding thunder above. His expression was naked, bared to the utter foundation of his essence with flaring eyes and a masculine set jaw clenching oversized fangs, and he scraped the remnants of agony and a millennium of exhausting burden to further strengthen his physical form. "You are an abomination to be obliterated from existence!! And I will gladly deliver such justice!!"  
  
The armored gargoyle hissed back at him, and if he were a dragon, he would have filled the air around them with a breath of flame. "I am immortal, fool! And I will still be alive when you have died and crumbled to dust!" Sobek captured both of Goliath's arms by the wrists, compressing his bony talons deep into the flesh, and held the lavender gargoyle at bay. "I will obliterate each and every one of your traitorous clan, and any brethren spawned!!" He propelled the heavy brow of sharp bone above his eyes into Goliath's head, stunning him, and launching him away with a fantastic strength. "But only as you are forced to watch...therein lies what makes me smile, it's almost carnal, in a purely plutonic way, I assure you."  
  
Goliath tumbled down a steep slope, made slick by the pouring rain. Using his talons, he dug into the roof, leaving a distinct and jagged trail of four long clawmarks, and slowed his descent before reaching the louvered edge. "I will find a way to destroy you!!" Goliath hollered, picking himself back up and running towards Sobek, his adrenaline now feeding his body and guiding his actions. "Even if it means sacrificing my life to do so!!"  
  
"Only I will decide when and how you die, Goliath!" bellowed the Egyptian, balancing himself on the sharply descending rooftop and outlined by the flickers of lightning above. "My terms, my choice, my fun!"  
  
Goliath charged and toppled Sobek, plowing him through a few freestanding structures, as splinters of wood and brick sprayed into the air. They exchanged blow for blow, the strongest gargoyle in all the world driving his fists against the strongest gargoyle in all of history, and in their war of might and strength, they slowly demolished the church rooftop around them, weakening the supports. Blood erupted from their battle, flesh bruised and bones weakened from the blows they lay upon each other, and the pounding rain washed away the spattered fluids. Goliath swept his fist across Sobek's face, shredding his skin in a thunderous blow yet shattering a few of the bony plates forming the misshapen skull, but Sobek crossed an arm against Goliath's temple, followed by another. He attacked his chest and stomach, he used the bony plates covering his exposed muscular structure to rend flesh and damage the lavender giant beyond what any other man could take.  
  
Though under a relentless assault, Goliath held to the anger threatening to burst from his chest, using the pain as his greatest weapon and the smell of hot spilled blood as his most potent fuel. Goliath dodged a blow, and allowed Sobek's arm to cross by his bruised face. He then grabbed the appendage, broke the elbow joint over his shoulder and picked Sobek up. Using the mutant's weight as momentum, Goliath forced him down onto his head and neck, surely shattering his spinal cord and rendering any other being dead instantly. Sobek's limp body rolled down the opposite slope and was saved only from plummeting to the ground when snaring upon a louvered ridge. Goliath took the opportunity to catch his breath, as Sobek seemed deathly still. But as he of course knew, the moment would not last. Sobek, though his neck and head wrenched from normal position, stirred and slowly pulled himself up. He shuddered and trembled, his spine unhinged and pierced by bone and deadening his body's motor control, until one swift motion summoned a nauseating crack into the air as Sobek jerked his head and replaced his vertebrae into alignment. He smiled, enjoying the unique sensation of acidic fire having flooded his nervous system. "One point for you." he purred, cracking his twisted elbow joint back into its original position, the immortality spell healing almost instantly the smaller wound.  
  
Sobek started in a brisk sprint towards the waiting gargoyle, as Goliath tried to evade the savage attack. He sidestepped the Egyptian, but Sobek only vaulted into the air and flipped backwards onto Goliath. Their combined weight proved too much for the battle-ravaged rooftop, and the structure destabilized and ultimately collapsed in on itself. With Sobek on top of him, Goliath was first to impact upon the great pipe organ seated behind the church podium. It played a tortured song, a deep metallic wheeze when being torn apart by Goliath's weighted bulk and the debris from the roof. Goliath was buried beneath the rubble, several tons of broken wooden beams and metal sheeting collapsing on top of him as Sobek dodged the brunt of wreckage with his wings and rolled away.  
  
Seeing the damage produced, and the lifeless form of his adversary partially submerged, Sobek licked the bony separation of his mouth. "And one point for me." he strutted, as Goliath moaned in pain, his eyes flickering when waking from under the rooftop remains. "Tie game."  
  
Sobek crept closer, as Goliath struggled against the sweet, addictive rapture of unconsciousness, each step of the mutated gargoyle a powerful tremor rippling across the ground, to better warn the disposed Wyvern leader of the threat looming above him. Bleeding, bruised and wet from the rain pouring through the jagged hole above, he grappled against the sheer tonnage compressing his chest and legs, with Sobek's close presence threatening a gruesome reprisal.  
  
"How does it feel, Goliath, to be buried alive?!" he screamed to entrapped gargoyle. "Do you have any idea how long it took me to crawl my way from the rubble in Egypt?! My immortal flesh not allowing me to die?!"  
  
"I had hoped it would be an eternity..." stalled Goliath, for the precious seconds he needed. "It is more than you ever deserve." The Egyptian approached, presumably to either continue his gloating or his amusement, as Goliath's hand slipped underneath to search for a weapon. He grasped something smooth and rounded with a tapered tip, and he slipped it from the pile, clutching his claws around it to ready a coming blow.  
  
"Hrkk..." Sobek gasped, and shuddered, as that same something Goliath had fortunately found now pierced through his lower torso and burst through his backside. A hollowed, notched pipe from the destroyed organ, once a gleaming gold now stained with the black, viscous fluid pouring from his chest. Sobek stepped back, slightly surprised and a masochistic gleam in his eye, the pain sustaining him, building on his twisted desires to play out his retribution. "...interesting...the game continues..."  
  
****************************************  
  
An orange flame parted the darkness, washing across the entire street as the winged and strangely humanoid suit of armor landed softly, spreading cinders from the louvered rocket scoop to roll and bounce across the wetted asphalt. Todd powered off the Epsilon boosters and dropped Elisa to the ground, but what he found drowning within the runoff of rainwater trickling through the gutters chilled him to the proverbial bone. "Rose..." In an instant he was by her side, pulling delicately on the huddled mass of black robes stained by blood and stale water and the stench of decay. Using great care with his armored, taloned appendages, Todd pulled his caretaker from the soiled, urban brook and laid her ever so gently onto the road. "Oh god, no...oh fuck...Rose..." The Epsilon mask split and pulled away to reveal Todd's tear-stained face, as the falling rain diluted the blood still pouring from her body and created a hundred tiny, murky crimson trails guiding themselves back towards the drainage ditch. "You can't leave me...please...don't leave me..."  
  
Elisa came to his side and reached two fingers to press against the nun's neck, feeling for the pulse of life. Elisa's features crumpled into sorrow, the flesh of the nun stone cold, unresponsive, and empty. "Todd..." she whispered, pulling back the dripping mass of fallen strands. "I can't feel a pulse...I think she's..."  
  
"No..." he cried silently, clenching the frail elder woman to his chest and burying his face into her chest, sobbing, howling into the skies with his pain. His breathing was erratic, broken and he appeared as if he would snap the corpse held in his arms in two with the Epsilon's mechanical strength. "Shit...oh shit, please no!! NO!!!"  
  
Elisa slumped onto her knees beside him, watching as the normally boisterous man wept openly, and in a second of wandering uncertainty she wondered, as the rain drummed across her glowing skin, if she had shed tears that were only lost in the caress of water against her flesh all but numbed of sensation. But movement then caught her weary gaze. And slight. Elisa noticed in sudden interest, as Rose's lifeless arm draped to the street twitched only just. "What the hell?"  
  
Her eyes suddenly shot open, and she sucked in a breath filtered through blood filled lungs. Rose came to life within the arms of the boy she raised, clawing at his chest, her rampant fears and the damage to her body erupting through all her senses. She was panicking, and in that, only aggravated her injuries.  
  
Though grateful, Todd now struggled to hold her, the nun flailing her arms and vomiting streams of blood in her struggle to breathe. "Rose!!" he screamed to her. "It's okay!! I'm here!!" But the sight of the one stable, unwavering element from his childhood reduced to a quivering mass of frightened eyes and flowing blood only served to unnerve him as well. "I won't let you die..." And in a desperate motion guided only by a panicked heart, Todd scooped Rose into his arms, closed the Epsilon's mask and powered the rockets.  
  
Elisa was forced back to narrowly escape the column of flame pouring from the backside of the armored suit, as Todd took to the rain-soaked skies heading back towards the Eyrie. In seconds he was too far enveloped by the angrily churning billows of stormcloud to be seen with the naked eye, and Elisa knew he was frantic to save her, and thus she wished him well. "Get her home, Mr. Hawkins." she whispered sympathetically, staring into the descending deluge. Dropping her eyes to where the blurry, rain-streaked surroundings darkened all into an amethyst haze, the light from the church doors almost called to her with the warm light having spilled into the street. Elisa pulled her gun and started briskly towards where the sounds of a war exploded outwards from through the doors, her husband a combatant with the price of his very life on the line.  
  
****************************************  
  
She stole through the opened doorway, and met her gaze with the ruins of a once beautiful church, stripped now of any and all splendor and laid to waste in the battle between titans. The entire structure creaked and swayed with the powerful winds, beams toppled, walls were near collapse, the church was being slowly destroyed.  
  
But a linked security gate locked across the entire length of the foyer blocked her path with thin but sturdy strips of steel, and Elisa frantically tried to find a way past to where two shadowed figures clashed and destroyed all in their path. "Goliath!!" she screamed, when seeing her husband tossed towards her, shredding a path through the rows of pews and throwing the broken splinters into the air. "Jesus..." Her mate struggled to raise himself from the wreckage of wooden bench, his flesh torn open, his once satin lavender hide marred by streams of blood and grit. He was ravaged by a war having taken great toll on his physical form, and she now knew the extent of the damage they had inflicted upon each other in the short time they fought.  
  
"I smell a new player." came the guttural snarl of the voice that once haunted her deepest nightmares. A raised balcony, perhaps for a choir now forgotten, was torn apart in a single swipe and another, even bigger figure stepped through the cloud of dust and debris. "I smell the stench of human."  
  
She trembled in his appearance, guiding shaken eyes to a metamorphosis almost eight feet tall and deprived of its skin. He was truly a creature of malice in appearance now, the magical mutation having assured his exterior matched what darkness lay within. "Oh my god..." she gasped, as Sobek emerged from the dust quickly diluted and cleared by the rain, the organ pipe still pierced straight through him, just above his thick belt and gold-rimmed loincloth, as if he could not be bothered to pull it out. Elisa fumbled her hand into her jacket, pulling out her comm device. "Elisa to Wyvern..." she whispered, opening a direct frequency to the castle. "I need help! Brooklyn, send me backup now!! Sobek, he's..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...here. God...he's huge...and Goliath's severely injured...he's bleeding...badly..."  
  
Brooklyn listened to the entire message through his own communication device hooked over his ear. The raw, unconcealed fear in Elisa's voice was unmistakable, even with the slight distortion of the digital channel perceptible only to a gargoyle's finely honed sense of hearing. "Elisa," he whispered, scanning the monitors in the main computer chamber, "I...I can't give you any backup."  
  
"...Why not?!..."  
  
"Because..." Brooklyn watched with thinned eyes the spotlights swathe effortlessly through the heavy cloud cover and sheeting rain, searchingly, heralding the arrival of the airborne army now only minutes away. The sleek, black helicopters soon emerged from behind their camouflage of the storms, and into Wyvern's perimeter. A blinding trail of light slid across the Eyrie building's gleaming exterior, joined by others rising up to touch upon the empty parapets, and bringing every dark crevice of Wyvern into perfect, brilliant clarity. The helicopters surrounded the Eyrie with their spotlights trained on the castle, the two smaller attack fighters encircling, as if hunting for any creature not human, and Brooklyn knew if even a single gargoyle left the castle, he or she would most certainly be flying into certain death. "Because we have visitors."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Damn." whispered Elisa, inhaling sharply.  
  
"I have you, said the spider to the fly." Sobek muttered, steering a ravenous gaze towards Elisa. "The whore. Those gates I locked to keep any extraneous players from the game."  
  
Goliath rose to deflect the Egyptian's eyes from his wife locked behind them both. He turned and glanced his steeled eyes to her own, and passed within blurred seconds the raw essence of his love, before rising to meet the approaching Egyptian, the wounds suffered at Goliath's hands healing, closing the great rifts in his form.  
  
"Your presence was of course expected, stubborn human," Sobek revealed, "but ultimately satisfying, when I kill you in front of your mate."  
  
"Never..." wheezed Goliath, jumping to his feet and grabbing the pipe, twisting his insides and lifting Sobek off his feet. Goliath held him above as if a trophy kill, waving the Egyptian around until running him into one of the supporting columns, bringing down yet another portion of ceiling, the church slowly being gutted, and emptied of beauty. With Sobek momentarily stunned, Goliath pulled out the pipe from his torso and readied for the kill. "I've always wondered if an immortal can survive...without his head." He impaled the pipe's conical, razor-sharp end through Sobek's neck, trying if anything to sever his head from his shoulders.  
  
Sobek gagged for breath through a non-existent throat, his wild eyes burning in blinding amber flame, the pipe buried into the ground with the power behind Goliath's thrust and effectively restraining the immortal. But before Goliath could do further damage, he swatted him away, using his long, bony claws to take from him a piece of flesh from his brow, blinding him with his own blood. Having proved his greater strength, Elisa now feared her husband's chances and scrambled to get through the gate blocking her path, Goliath straggling and maintaining a precarious balance. She pulled her gun and aimed at the lock, letting loose an entire clip to try and destroy the heavy steel mechanism linking the enclosure together. But still it would not budge, connected in several places where the two sides joined. Elisa released the catch to her gun, allowing the despairingly empty clip to fall to the ground. She tried to reload, her hands shivering, trembling violently in the futile attempt until a weakened rumble breathed upon the air.  
  
"Get...out..." It was Goliath, fallen to one knee on the other side of the gate, and still rendered near sightless by one eye nearly swelled shut, and the blood dripping into his field of vision from a fresh gash slashed across his brow.  
  
Elisa looked up, to see a bloodied warrior draped in a scarlet sheathe granted by battle. "No. I won't."  
  
"Get out..." he ordered again, as Elisa helped to steady his body through the security gate, watching from the corner of her eyes Sobek pinned to the ground by the pipe skewered through his neck. "This is...my fault, get to...safety..."  
  
"No, I'm not leaving you!" she responded mulishly, clearing the blood from her husband's eyes, a touch tender, and delicate. "I had no idea Sobek was this strong...the clan can't come, and you can't do this by yourself..."  
  
"His mutation...has changed him..." Goliath wheezed, slapping a hand to her shoulder with his talons digging urgently into the leather material. "Though he has no magical abilities anymore, he is far stronger...you cannot be here..." His eyes were pleading behind the dark charcoal, the glimmer of hope nearly extinguished. "...he wants only destruction, he is insane...you must go...and let me finish what I started..."  
  
"And leave you to die in some death wish guided by pride and pain?!"  
  
"It is not pride...but duty..." Goliath amended.  
  
"Bullshit."  
  
"Please leave..."  
  
"I don't think so," Elisa graced a hand to his cheek through the gate, warm, tawny silk on callused, torn flesh, to better make him understand what this foolhardy errand would cost him of he indeed lost, "I'll never leave you. You and I are one, remember?"  
  
Goliath paused, seeing perhaps his foolishness and despair echoed in deep, dark chocolate. He relented and nodded slowly, knowing his wife, his mate, would never abandon him no matter what the cost. "Now...and forever." They joined lips from either side of the gate, tasting the other, and sapping their strength to use as their own. She was luscious, warm, he was sweet, satisfying, and the strands of time were pulled taught, and brought to a halt when Goliath and Elisa bridged their souls through the simple gesture of a kiss.  
  
"...bonessss...break..." he whispered behind them, his throat healing over the pipe and allowing him only half a whisper for a voice. "...humanssss...ssssscream...a melody...of sssweet sssorrow..." He pulled from his neck the organ pipe, dripping from the hollow his own sanguineous blood. "...inssssanity issss in...th' eye of th'...beholder..." he choked, the deep cavity repairing itself, tendons linking with the aid of invisible hands, vocal cords mending and an esophagus growing from the bloody stump left when severed by the pipe. "Perhaps the world is insane...and I am merely trying to set right what went wrong when the monkeys shed their tails and fur, dropped from the trees and somehow rose to the top of the foodchain with their technology and arrogance." He was healed almost completely in less time it took Elisa to at last reload another clip to her gun, though the reward of his restored breathing functions was a voice slightly scratched. "I will hopefully even the score soon enough with the help of my newest business partner, but until then, I am going to amuse myself."  
  
Goliath turned only to have a clawed hand sink its talons into his shoulder, and wrench him from his wife. Elisa was left helpless behind the gate with a hand reached out to grasp the air still warmed by her husband's presence, as Goliath was dragged away and into the clearing, a wasteland left from the battle, and drenched from the constant rain pouring through the gaping hole above. Sobek mercilessly threw him into yet another pile of rubble, treating his form like nothing but a lifeless toy. He raked a fist across Goliath's jaw, and tossed him through another thick support beam, with Elisa forced to watch as her husband relinquished more of his blood to the floor and rubble around them.  
  
"You son of a bitch!!" she screamed, aiming her gun towards the Egyptian. "Let go of him!!" Fire erupted from her weapon, cracks of thunder in perfect aim and succession until she exhausted her ammunition into the slab of exposed scarlet sinew and muscle tissue that was Sobek.  
  
But he merely shrugged off the bullets having penetrated his flesh in deep, spattering craters, the wounds slowly sealing as if to never have existed, and he peered over his spurred shoulder to see Elisa clawing furiously at the gate to gain access when depleted of her ammunition, three full clips yielding nothing. Goliath took the opportunity to fight back, thrusting his fists into Sobek's stomach, but the Egyptian held firm through the pain, and brought down his arms onto either side of Goliath's neck. He held to him and hammered a clenched fist into the gargoyle's face, blow after repeated blow, determined the crush his features, and blacken his skin.  
  
"I have tried poison." he hissed, bringing up a spurred knee up into Goliath's midsection, knocking the wind from his lungs and scraping away even more flesh with the sharp, boned ridge. "I have tried magic." He lifted the gargoyle up over his shoulders, displaying his beaten carcass for an imaginary audience and perhaps laughing in the face of some fictional god the humans foolishly worshipped. "I have even tried to hire those to do my bidding. And yet you and your clan escape into safety every single time. Thus, I shall try a new approach to end this streak of fortune." The veins of lightning above set to flame the heavens overhead, and Goliath was thrown down onto Sobek's knee, his back arching horrifically over the Egyptian's powerful leg, with a crack resounding across the hollow cavern of the church in a horrid echo of breaking bone. Goliath draped limply, his mouth having fallen open, his jaw gaping and crying out in a silent, agonized scream. "My bare hands."  
  
Elisa pounded on the linked gate with anything she could find, trying with all her strength to find a way through the small entranceway to get to her husband. "Sobek!!" she screamed again, a helpless, tortured cry besting even the storm's awesome power. "SOBEK!!!"  
  
"This is MY game! You are my plaything, my toy, and like a spoiled child I shall take you apart piece by piece." He gripped a hand underneath Goliath's throat, when unsatisfied of the Wyvern gargoyle's agonizingly slow ascent to his knees, his injuries grievous and suckling his very strength. "The sands will run red, and your clan's disloyal blood will paint the way to the future."  
  
"YOU BASTARD!!!" Elisa howled, forced to watch as her husband wavered on his knees in front of Sobek, the psychotic's intentions all too clear. "Please! Please...no, don't do it..."  
  
"You have denied me so many times my new world." He released, and Goliath fell over onto his stomach in a cloud of dust, conquered, beaten. Sobek grabbed his enemy's wings and shored his hands onto the thick struts, placing a foot onto the small of Goliath's back nestled with bulging muscle. "So I now deny you the skies."  
  
"Goliath!!" Elisa clambered and frantically battered her hands against the gate, tears streaming down her face. "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"  
  
Sobek gritted and pulled on Goliath's wings, and it seemed too effortless, to deprive him of his greatest gift, that to kiss the clouds and bend the heavens' breeze to his will. Muscle separated from bone, tendons snapped and nerves were severed as the flesh, stretched to its limits, liquefied and ultimately tore from around where the wings joined to the shoulder blades. Goliath dug his talons into the ground, an unimaginable pain erupting through his back and eliciting a wail ripped from the depths of his soul to explode into the church.  
  
It was a sound never heard before, that of an angel's scream, and the desecration by a demon cackling as if a jackal. Sobek twisted and heaved one last time, tearing Goliath's wings from his back. The bloodied stumps gave way, and Sobek raised the severed, dripping sails into the air as a tangible prize of conquest.  
  
Elisa watched from behind the gate, terrified into a stunned silence by a sight that would render anyone else with a weaker resolve anesthetized of sensation or speech. Blood sprayed, and reached as far to spatter across her face. Her husband's blood, scalding hot, and fusing with the tears run rampant and streaming from her face. "Oh my god..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"And we're not activating the weapons systems why?!"  
  
"Hopefully we can quietly bluff our way out of this without even having to lift a finger, or we'll only attract more attention to the fact this castle has something to hide by having several million dollars worth of weaponry pop out."  
  
Only barely satisfied of an answer infuriatingly flawless in logic, Broadway heaved a heavy, forced breath, his chest falling onto his enlarged stomach, concealing compressed muscle. "And what do WE do?" he questioned Brooklyn again. "Just wait here inside and do nothing?"  
  
Brooklyn transfixed his eyes to the screen, seeing the two smaller attack craft continue to circle the Eyrie as the five larger cargo helicopters strutted lazily into position, vying against the wind for supremacy of the skies. The sounds of thunder were now traded for the mechanical drone of aircraft sending tremors through the castle walls when making their predatory pass, unnerving the entire clan, and making restless protective and aggressive instincts. "With the shield in place...yes."  
  
"And what about Goliath?!" came Angela's furied voice, far from composed and bordering on a scream for fear her father and step-mother may just perish. "He and Elisa are facing Sobek alone!"  
  
"We step outside, we're spotted," Brooklyn stressed, turning around to better calm a fiery soul, "and we confirm the fact gargoyles live on top of the Eyrie. Goliath was right about one thing, our very lives depend on our anonymity now, our concealment, and so do the lives of every single human ally we have. Our exposure will condemn this clan..." he paused, when noticing an eerie similarity to an earlier argument, now made pointless, "and I'm not going to allow that."  
  
"What about the steel clan? We can send the..."  
  
"They've spotted the hangar bay, Angela, and if we send out any weaponry, they might take it as hostile intent, and we may incidentally start an exchange of fire that would tear this castle apart. Better we go on the defensive right now."  
  
It was desperation now, with any and all attempt to make him understand her concerns. "You would sacrifice your leader," Angela whispered, "and your friend?"  
  
Brooklyn's ridges settled tranquilly, a keen intelligence flaunted with vivid eyes and a lean stance. He swallowed, and buttressed a slightly unctuous brogue from his youth, but tinged with prudence. "Any leader would sacrifice the few, to save the many...as would Goliath." he prompted softly, with Angela relenting only just. "My reward for taking leadership."  
  
Sensing yet another pass of the helicopters outside with the sudden ripple through the walls, she turned her head slightly to bury a sunken lip bitten and harnessed by her fangs, and any oncoming tears behind the wild strands of long, silky sepia bound with tied strips of fabric.  
  
Shadow noticed her fear, and tried in his own unique way to soothe her. "Goliath is perhaps one of the greatest warriors alive," said the winged shinobi, "he will prevail."  
  
"And if not, Shadow-san?" Sata questioned his stubborn faith, but only for the opponent Goliath now faced alone.  
  
Shadow seemed indifferent, his own apprehension hidden well among a facade of black ice he claimed to be warm flesh. "Then he'll die a death worthy of his stature."  
  
Othello scowled, more than usual, angered by the fact his brother was treated in such a way. His own feelings of guilt resurfaced, empowering his throaty rasp. "Cold comfort, ninja." he hissed, without truly realizing Shadow perhaps respected Goliath far more than ever known.  
  
"Goliath will not die..." whispered Desdemona solemnly, her arms crossed against her stomach. To steady the violent shivering that threatened to expose her misgivings to the others. "He cannot..."  
  
"That's enough." Brooklyn cut through, seeing the tensions slowly rise towards a breaking point. "Here's what we do. We're going to entrust any necessary defense of the castle to Mother, and we play guard duty in case they somehow get past the exterior energy shield and her defenses." He turned to the redhead swaddled in designer fashion, the expensive clothing molding to an athletic form, Fox idly and surreptitiously rubbing a finger across her throbbing temple. "Fox, I think it's best you handle the kids. Take them to the computer room, it's probably the safest place in the castle."  
  
"Sounds reasonable," Fox cut back, feigning good health to cover the pain erupting through her brow, "but what if the Guild just decides just to blow us up with all that firepower slapped beneath their helicopters?"  
  
"If they wanted to, we'd already be dead by now." Brooklyn answered. "The Guild has some twisted sense of innocence they preach, demonstrated by the attack at the precinct and their precision to leave survivors. I don't think they'll risk destroying the top of the tallest building in the world in the middle of a crowded district...yet."  
  
"They're going to attack in person, carefully." minded Broadway. "And judging by those larger helicopters, they're probably carrying a whole hell of a lot of Guild members..."  
  
Fox simply nodded.  
  
"And by the way, Fox," continued Brooklyn, turning back to the screens, "I want you to take Nicole too..."  
  
Dark emerald flashed open, spurred by the lapping flames of infuriation. "What makes you think she'll be better off with me than with the Guild?!" Fox muttered, with Brooklyn shrugging his shoulders and fawning his eyes in charismatic style. "Fine." she yielded, passing a quick embrace of her lips to her husband's cheek and leaving the room to find her son.  
  
"Hudson, Delilah, and little sis," Brooklyn nodded to the lost sister, "take the twins and get downstairs to the hospital. Protect the wounded."  
  
All too hesitant to face against Maria once more and be deprived of the chance to revenge his lost son, Hudson appeared as if to warrant another in his place. As love and revenge played a game within his heart, he instead heeded the orders given and answered quietly, and bitterly, "Aye."  
  
"The rest of us will stay here for now, if the Guild manages to breach those defenses, we'll be the last line."  
  
"It is funny, my love," mentioned Sata from her mate's side, "your voice is your own, but the words you speak are Goliath's."  
  
Brooklyn wrinkled his brow and fluffed his wings in the comparison. "How ironic."  
  
"I have evacuated all non-essential personnel," interrupted Xanatos, issuing his orders to a massive conglomerate sealed within the tallest of spires in all the world with just an intercom and cellphone, "and have positioned my personal security forces throughout the Eyrie. The entire building is sealed from bottom to top."  
  
"Security systems are on full standby alert." claimed Mother, the hologram resting ethereally to the side, her features unnervingly serene.  
  
"Have there been any communications attempts from the helicopters?" Brooklyn asked.  
  
"None whatsoever." Xanatos stood up from the computer monitor, and straightened his suit, waving his hand across any errant fold to crease the costly fabric suited to a king. "They don't seem in the mood for talking."  
  
Mother suddenly glanced to the side, the holographic representation of the matronly gargoyle contorting her mouth, a frown curling the edges of supple, orchid lips. "Brooklyn," she announced clearly, "using the orbiting weather satellite and its infrared sensors, I have been able to track the helicopters using their trajectory and exhaust trails to their origin of launch."  
  
"On the screen, Mother." Brooklyn ordered, and instantly the computer monitor displayed a thermal map of the New York state taken from the orbiting satellite, and centered on a trail made warm by the helicopters' fumes. It had leaked a faint trail towards the shores of Long Island, near the sprawling kingdom of machines that was JFK airport. Mother highlighted the area of the map, and focused inwards, each screenshot a closer view, until Brooklyn was met with an area of industrial warehouses along the shoreline. It seemed now there was a very plausible explanation why the clan could not locate the Guild, for they would never think to search an ally's own property. "What the hell...?" he whispered in disbelief, seeing the clear mark of a Xanatos Enterprises logo on a small cluster of warehouses and hangar bays where the trail had most assuredly started.  
  
Xanatos pulled back somewhat, noticing the abrupt change in Brooklyn's body language, rigid, and very, very angry.  
  
The kindle of white fire in Brooklyn's eyes was far too prevalent, as he turned his head to force from David Xanatos an answer. "What the hell is the Guild doing in a Xanatos Enterprises warehouse?!" he growled.  
  
"I assure you," countered Xanatos coolly, he himself surprised, "I have no idea. Perhaps the storm distorted the vapor trails..."  
  
An excuse exceedingly flimsy, a deed all too damaging to his clan and the billionaire's wavering credibility, Brooklyn grabbed upon the human's collar, and wrenched him close. "Xanatos, you..."  
  
"Oh my god..."  
  
The entire clan turned and followed Annika's fearful glare, towards the entranceway, where a solitary figure held in his arms a dying woman. Draped in Todd's arms, Rose lay comatose, limp, and the Epsilon armor lost the raven sheen to a dulled scarlet stain, the chestplate completely covered in blood thinned by the rains. The mask was open, and Todd wept, begging to them to do anything in their power. "HELP HER, PLEASE!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
The damage now done, an act to rival the most malevolent in history, Goliath lay upon the floor in the growing pool of his own viscous, sticky fluids, surging relentlessly from the two matching, gaping holes in his back where once his wings rested proudly. Now only a few remnants of tattered membrane that still adhered to the flesh allowed belief to what had existed before. He was numb, lost in a haze of torturous pain, and he suffered the similar agony of being on fire, his senses dulled to only a single, graveling drone echoing all around him.  
  
Sobek threw away the forcefully amputated wings, and reached down, plunging his talons around the back of Goliath's neck. He crouched and raised the gargoyle up, to where he could better graze a bristle of victory across Goliath's ear. "I hope my demonstration was effective," Sobek seethed, "my past boasts may have been a little too far reaching for my abilities. I hope I have convinced you otherwise." He twisted his hand, forcing an incredible pressure on Goliath's neck and spine, and the severely injured gargoyle cringed, a moan trickling from his throat like the small stream of blood curling around the jutting chin. "I would kill you now, but that is far too easy an escape from what I wish to inflict upon you. I want you to suffer! I want you to scream and burn and experience more pain than anyone would ever dream!!"  
  
Goliath was released, left to crumple into a defeated heap, and Sobek slowly, deliberately crossed his gaze to where Elisa lay slumped against the security gate, her eyes never having left Goliath, the droplets of his blood slowly creeping down the length of her face. She heeded nothing but her husband's incredible suffering, the detective consumed in a state of shock and barely cognizant to the mutated gargoyle stalking his ways towards her. He ripped away the intrusive gates without breaking a proverbial sweat, surprising Elisa, and as she stared up at him with eyes made dewy, and blurred with the amount of tears she had spilled, it was as if a dream. A nightmare, where no one person or event were real, where she would soon wake to see her husband whole, and healed and well.  
  
The arguments seemed so far away, the petty bickering so damnably stupid amongst the reality of his death. She continued staring at Sobek with clouded eyes, chocolate diluting to a milky beige in narcosis and vacuity. Sobek smothered a smile and grabbed her, hauling the detective by the scruff of the neck towards her downed mate. She stifled a cry of pain, unwilling to show any more weakness towards this creature, born of cruel, soul-destroying happenstance.  
  
Sobek held a struggling Elisa over Goliath, gloating yet another assault he could bring upon the gargoyle, far more damaging than even the fact he had already taken his wings. Sobek kicked him, forcing a clawed foot into his side to rouse him into at least a semi-state of consciousness. "Listen to her squeals of torture, Goliath," warned Sobek, with Goliath laboring greatly to lift himself with a single arm, "for she's about to die. And perhaps..." His delved into Elisa's neck, inhaling the aroma exuded of fear and lilac, refreshing a memory long ago of what it would be like to taste her, to devour and savor the mother of a new, wretched race. "I will just eat your precious mate in front of you." He teased his free hand about her neck and chest much to Elisa's horror, his talons tracing sweet flesh, wanting for the kill, for the feast, and the delicious, continuing torture of Goliath. But when reaching her stomach, he paused, the wicked grin all but falling away. He raised her shirt and clasped his talons into the lower region of her stomach, his great hearing and acute senses detecting a presence, and the faint but steady rhythm of life trembling through his fingers like a tuning fork. Buried beneath the folds of her flesh her womb, and a secondary pulse to her own, extremely weak, but with an accelerated, waning cadence, akin only to a fetus. "You are with child..." he whispered.  
  
Elisa widened her eyes, perhaps surprised in the revelation but relieved her sickness had a plausible, and welcome explanation. Another child, once denied by her husband but now blessed by him as well in a fleeting moment of passion through a time of death, and she nearly shed tears in the irony.  
  
"You are breeding again?!" he snarled angrily, as if she had performed the greatest of sins against him. "Damnable human slut, you must enjoy the warmth and taste of your man's seed, and savor it like wine." The vindictive discharge against his wife and the fact she may just die in front of his eyes provoked Goliath further, stirring a greater fight to raise himself from the gleaming slick pooled around him. Yet Sobek pressed his foot down onto Goliath's back, grinding his heel into the gushing wound and falling the gargoyle once more. "Every single night, humanity proves once again it is driven only by greed and sloth and lust." he growled. "You are locusts, raping this world of every resource."  
  
"...not...true..." Elisa managed to gasp, a free hand furtively reaching towards her left foot.  
  
"You are cattle, worth only to be fed upon." he spit, his breath vile, and caustic, perhaps the remnants of an earlier meal floating upon the exhale. "But I will not feed on a human carrying a mongrel child." He pulled his sword quickly, disgusted and having lost his appetite for Elisa's flesh. Similar to how he had dispatched of Rose, Sobek tormented his captive with the edge of his sword aimed directly for her stomach, where incased deep within her held the most precious of goods. "You made a fatal mistake that will ultimately cost you, Goliath." he gloated over the lavender giant, with Goliath barely able to move while planted directly under Sobek's clawed heel. "You overestimated your chances, your strength...and ultimately underestimated mine."  
  
Feeling the tip press into her stomach, Elisa made a last ditch effort lest she and her unborn child suffer grievously. "You...made a mistake also, Sobek..." she hissed, bending to the limits her body would allow to reach into a hidden holster on her ankle. "You underestimated ME." Suddenly, before the immortal had time to react to the cold steel pressed against his brow, Elisa tightened her grasp on the smaller, hidden weapon and gouged from over her shoulder a serrated hunting knife directly through Sobek's eye. A lucky shot, an impeccable aim, and Elisa pressed deeper into the inside of his skull when twisting the knife, and eventually tore it across his face. "Returning the favor, asshole. You mess with my mate, you mess with me."  
  
With a sufficient piece of his head missing, gaping openly to what lay inside, Sobek howled, dropped Elisa and reeled backwards, hunched over and attempting to keep inside what tried to push its way out. "Bravado..." he hissed to Elisa's wallow. "Makes me wish to retch." He was blinded, one eye damaged, the other completely missing where the chunk of skull had been removed with a surgical precision all but crude, all too effective. "You will decorate my sword with the pieces of your child, damnable whore!!"  
  
Elisa fell to her feet and rolled away as Sobek, led behind her by her scent, swiped wildly with his sword at any sound he perceived that danced across the ground in front of him. She escaped another slash with only a small chunk of flailing hair being severed, Elisa dodging back and forth between the razor sharp blade. "Goliath!!" she screamed, wrapping her hands around an arm the size of her waist. "We have to go!!" Goliath crawled to his hands and knees, staggering, and vulnerable, and yet unable to rise on his own strength. Sobek lunged closer, and Elisa grew desperate. "Move, damnit!!" she growled, an adrenaline rush and the desperate need to save him pushing Goliath up. "MOVE!!!" They narrowly missed another sword swipe, Sobek attracted to the sounds of Elisa's frantic screaming. Even as she peered onto the severed wings lying only meters away, Elisa guided him away to safety, the couple staggering towards the doorway, and forced to climb over debris and fallen beams holding an unstable cathedral, littering a trail of Goliath's blood.  
  
As Sobek's eyesight returned to the eye less damaged with a healing magic, he discovered through an obscuring, milky cataract a mass of lavender retreating from view. It was enough to lead him forwards. "Not yet..." Sobek managed as best he could, near blinded and simply wrenching the beams away as he created a straight path towards them. His frantic charge towards them flew beams against the walls, and weakened the last supports this aged building had left. His quest, his game, would not be denied by some dilapidated monument to humanity's gods.  
  
Elisa looked behind her to see Sobek gaining as if some unstoppable tempest, and she pushed Goliath with all her strength to the point where even her diminutive human shell propelled her husband faster than he could travel with such draining wounds. "Go, Goliath!!" she yelled, using her voice to spur him on, her husband nearly reduced to crawling on his hands and knees over the downed and still falling debris. "He's right behind us, and this place is coming down!! GO!!!"  
  
"No..." said the giant deprived of wings, his eyes somehow catching a flaw obvious in the structure's sustaining beams on the verge of collapse. It was a crack, almost invisible, but rising upwards in a lawless trail. "...not yet..." Goliath broke from Elisa and suddenly swerved, inelegantly, and using his weight as momentum he speared himself through a massive joist dangerously close to falling. The pillar at last snapped, and split and severed a needed brace for the already ruined ceiling. The damage wrought condemned the church to a shudder passing through its walls and growing in strength, and Goliath yelped in pain as a smaller rafter fell directly onto his back, momentarily stunning him with severed nerves set afire. Elisa dodged more beams and planks to run to him, her slim form darting recklessly with a fool's luck between a hundred tons of rooftop falling inwards and threatening to devour them all. Sobek could only hear the building breaking apart, and feel the tremors wrinkling through the floor.  
  
The pain fogging his eyes and reducing them to a blurred field of white and dark, dripping red, Goliath allowed Elisa to guide him towards the doors and they escaped just as the foyer crumpled and collapsed, leaving Sobek to look anxiously around him, trapped. Beams fell, walls caved in, and half the ceiling dropped on top of him. He looked up, seeing the world become dark and close in on him, and a rather large strut tip it's broken end towards him. "Another point for you, Goliath..." he whispered in admiration before he was impaled through the stomach and chest, an appropriate reckoning, and then buried once more.  
  
****************************************  
  
Into the tempest they fled, the streets slick and treacherous and Elisa forced to drag the massive creature that was her mate and lover through the pouring rain. The metallic, tinny stench of blood she could not readily escape, the clouds scraping together overhead and setting a flaxen fire to the skies, alighting a path vague at best into where the shadows would willingly engulf them in whole.  
  
She was even now surprised at her husband's incredible strength and his sheer will to stumble and walk himself towards the alleyway, his entire back slick with blood and rain. He looked almost farcically, morbidly human without the broad, encompassing sails suspended from behind his shoulders, and Elisa nearly languished into a sea of tears every time she either purposely or inadvertently crossed her eyes over the two distinct gashes ripped in Goliath's backside, layered in dust and soot. A part of her wanted to scream at him, to admonish his recklessness driven by an untamed rage and despair having welled inside of him, but she found those words, those feelings, would only lead to further the rift and ultimately serve no purpose.  
  
Through all she loved him, through everything he was her soul.  
  
They found shelter in the dark crevasse between two brick buildings, ancient by the crumbling appearance and allowing only a slim, foreboding crack atwixt. Goliath faltered and collapsed into the wet, squalid sanctuary behind a dumpster, releasing a steady stream of swirling breath from where he once stood to where he fell.  
  
Elisa was almost dragged down with him, doing her best to support a creature that outweighed her nearly six times, and fell onto her knees into the grimy stream running through the alleyway. He breathed raggedly, like a wounded animal wheezing it's last pain-filled exhales when awaiting the embrace of death. He moved his lips, but no words came, and Elisa leaned over to drag away her husband's sodden hair from features battered, swelled and distorted from an onslaught of an immortal's maniacal retribution, but still handsome, still rugged, eye-catching and daring. "Don't die on me, Big Guy, you hear me?" she returned an order towards him, her voice as adamant as steel. "Stay with me. Stay alive."  
  
Goliath moved his eyes down to stare at the hunting knife Elisa held to for some sense of cold comfort and never before seen, a few strips of leather dangling from the dog-eared grip with a Hopi tribal design. It was a question asked without breath.  
  
"An old gift from my dad," Elisa answered automatically, dashing her eyes from where the broken church stood to the broken pile of lavender and scarlet below her, "passed down from my grandfather and sharp enough to cut through a molecule. Thought I might need it..." She weighed her options, but the first priority when her police training emerged and screamed at her instinctively was to do anything to stop Goliath's bleeding.  
  
Knowing the material of her leather jacket would not suffice, she reluctantly sheathed her knife and lifted the lid of the dumpster, battling through the stench of wet refuse to find anything usable. "There has to be something here..." she muttered to herself, as she overturned an old canvas tarp, but with enough fabric content to allow for a makeshift bandage. "This will have to do." She pulled it out wasting no time and draped it around Goliath's back, hoping if anything to slow the blood. But when faced directly against his backside, she slowed her pace, forced headlong into a once beautiful trait she cherished now despairingly absent. The wounds were grotesque, flesh torn like tissue paper, ligaments hanging loose and the gleaming ivory of raw bone forming emptied sockets where the wings struts once were. Biting her lip and trying to block the rise of nausea into her throat, she lifted the canvas onto the wounds, and tied the tarp securely under Goliath's arms.  
  
The gargoyle was near unresponsive, the sheer loss of blood weakening a form evolved for any battle, and prepared for any fight. Now enfeebled to the infirmity of a child, Goliath slumped against the brick wall, perhaps unaware of the true damage suffered. It was only Elisa's warm touch, her fingers stroking gently across his torn brow and reviving his deadened hide, that kept his eyes open, that kept another breath flowing through his compressed lungs.  
  
"Goliath, stay with me." she whispered, curling an arm around his neck to pull him up, but he was lifeless, obstinate and heavy and well beyond her strength to move him. "Damnit, Goliath, don't let Sobek beat you now!" She sympathized for him, truly, deeply, his soul was half of hers, but she knew Sobek would soon heal, and would do anything to obliterate the lasting remnants of sanity he clung to. "Come on! We have to move!" she screamed, wrenching upon his arm. "He'll heal, and come after us!"  
  
"...he took them..." A whisper loud enough to be heard over the pouring rain ceased Elisa's struggle, as Goliath swathed through the alley eyes delirious, and extinguished of the steeled fire when rimmed with the edges of tears. "...he took...my wings..."  
  
Elisa paused, searching for any answer to his cryptic statement besides heeding the urge to fall into a heap onto his chest and weep for him and his tremendous loss. "I know..." she whispered. "And the fact I couldn't do anything to stop kills me...but he's still out there, Goliath, and we have to move."  
  
"I cannot..." wheezed the gargoyle, physically drained, emotionally defeated.  
  
"Yes, you will." Slender fingers intertwined between thick claws, a bonding of flesh against flesh. "Or he'll take more. He'll take your clan, your daughters," she brushed a hand across her stomach, the impending pregnancy confirmed by the most unconventional of means, "both alive and yet to be born, he'll take everything away from you that you hold dear." Goliath looked up to her, one eye purpled and nearly swelled shut. "He'll strip you down to your soul, and take that away too. And I can't protect you against him for long."  
  
Silence followed, only the rhythmic kiss of the rain against the streets and the torrents of water pouring from the fire escape above. Goliath swayed, mulled and eventually climbed to his feet, clenching talons into the ruddy red fascia of fragile brick, and with Elisa's guidance, started down the alleyway. It was a crawl excruciatingly slow, his body wracked with pain, as Goliath prodded along the wall using his hand to pull his damaged form along towards the mouth of the alley, where an amber glow from the streetlights beckoned to them, spilling into the thin fracture where they made their escape.  
  
****************************************  
  
He broke through the layers of debris and reached out as if he was crawling from a fresh grave. It was a painful, excruciating process to remove the wreckage from around him, especially with a wooden girder stabbed entirely through his stomach.  
  
With his talons plunged deep into the oiled, oak beam, he used the remainder of his strength to push it upwards along with the rest of the debris swallowing him, and from out of his stomach. It toppled to the side, leaving the speared Egyptian to reach a hand inside of his completely gutted trunk, a cavernous wound nearly having torn him in half. Laughter, from a broken, impaled chest gurgled deeply in his throat, and the sensation of an intestinal tract and several major organs somehow reforming from the touch of magic stolen from another was near ecstasy.  
  
As his torso slowly glued back together, his lungs were created anew, and thus the power of speech came back to him, though rasped with the choking dust swallowed and tasting much like the sands of his homeland. "...i h-hate...b-being buried..." He studied the little device he had salvaged from the debris only moments before, having slipped from Goliath's belt during the battle and now secured in his hand, and he formed a smile as best he could with the cold features of a skull. "...goliath..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"..goliath..." came the crackle through Elisa's commlink, that stopped the detective dead in her tracks just before she and her husband reached the end of the alleyway. Goliath heard too with pinpointed hearing, Sobek's voice sputter through the private digital channel. "...I a-am...not finished..."  
  
"Yes, we are, bastard." Elisa answered against her better judgment, declaring all too stubbornly.  
  
"...The game...is not finished!! In fact...it has merely ascended to the second level, with much higher stakes...with the surprise I planted on top of the DeMoro building..."  
  
Elisa's heart grew cold, a spreading frigidity spreading throughout her chest in yet another of the madman's schemes. "What have you done?"  
  
"...Though the premise is rather tiresome of any adversary you have faced, it is something that I'm sure you will enjoy..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...Something I assured would continue the game even if we were interrupted by something even as inane as a human mongrel bitch and her knife..."  
  
Brooklyn perked up, having heard the entire conversation through the comm channel Sobek had inadvertently opened to all carriers of the devices. And with his entrapment inside the castle, he could only narrow his eyes into thinned, charcoal slits and gasp, "What?"  
  
****************************************  
  
"...Something I know will tear from you a part of your soul, as I did your wings from your body..."  
  
"Wings??" the lost sister gasped, having eavesdropped on her own commlink, and now learning of the extent of her brother's injuries. A dagger pierced through her heart, a painful throbbing mounted in the base of her throat. "Oh...my brother...by the dragon..." From her place in the Eyrie hospital her helplessness was proven, and the desperate need to aid Goliath was suppressed by heavy walls and duty to the patients she watched over. As Dr. Pierce readied for the arrival of another patient, as Hudson remained an acute distance from Maria and Delilah delved into the simplest of awkward smalltalk with Iliana, the lost sister stood silently, and solemnly in a flurry of activity erupting all around her. Her eyes trailed to the secured window staring out into the night sky wracked by distant storms, where her brother was lost and wounded and dying in the cold streets far from her grasp. "It must be a bomb." she whispered, perceptive to what Sobek had planned by the voice so cold, and by the intent so very plain and teased to the recipients in so many words left unsaid. "And Goliath will try to stop it no matter his injuries...or the cost to himself..."  
  
"You okay?" said Dr. Pierce, stopping to rest a hand to her shoulder bared from the hem of her tunic dress, and inquire when she fell silent and still in the midst of the preparation for Rose's arrival.  
  
Her eyes were glistening and apologetic to a friend she held in high regard, a teacher of sorts to the new world alongside her clan. "Dr. Alan," the moniker dropped from her lip like the last note in a ballad, with a smile regretful of what she felt she must do, "I have to go. Or like the stubborn man he is, he'll sacrifice himself."  
  
"Go?" he echoed, misunderstanding. "What are you..."  
  
"I cannot allow that." She traced the pronounced notch in his cheek with talons telling more than she was ever prepared to give. "Keep making miracles, Dr. Alan." She tore from him with such speed as to bring a subtle rush of wind from behind the doctor. Towards the small window locked and secured by a heavy steel plate, she wrenched it open and prepared to launch herself into the winds buffeted against the building.  
  
The scent of rain and ocean salt hit the entire room all too fiercely, with Hudson and Delilah giving their attention to the escaping gargess only as she slipped away.  
  
"What the hell are you doing?!" Pierce cried after her, his gaze wide and terrified of her slim chances to even survive, let alone grant aid to her beloved brother. "Damnit, wait!! I need you!" It was becoming desperate, his tone, from obligation to friendship to an inescapable attraction he called to her and implored to her not to risk such a foolish stunt. "Don't go..." But his voice settled on empty air, for she was already gone, and lost into a war zone wracked by winds. She had now become the prey to an enemy that promised her death if she was discovered outside the safety of her den.  
  
She dropped like a stone, using gravity to propel her towards the streets only inches from the descending floors of the Eyrie's steel exterior. The wind and the cascades of water screamed past her sleek shape in a barreled, swirling tempest, and she hoped to escape discreetly without attracting the steel hunters circling above. It was an assumption all too flawed, as a bright, blinding light soon settled on her falling form. One of the attack helicopters had spotted her on its pass around, and dropped in altitude to follow her.  
  
"We've spotted one!!" screamed the pilot in fear and near giddiness, seeing an actual creature attempt an escape, and falling almost as fast as his machine could fly. "An orange colored female heading straight towards the ground!"  
  
"...Then destroy it..." came the order through the pilot's communications system, issued in prescribed efficiency from a leader far above them. "...Now..."  
  
A mind like a living computer, the lost sister tested the winds with exacting senses and analyzed her best chances in cold, mechanical fashion. The helicopter descended fast and shadowed her, breathing a motorized hiss across her skin, but she kept her eyes on the street below, growing closer with every passing second. Her speed increased, and the sheer force of the plummet ripped against her flesh. She waited until the last second, as the rhythmic throb grew louder over the driving rain. She waited still, until her flesh registered the rotor's pounding right above her.  
  
Metal exploded, bullets flew, and a cold fire was released from the attack craft's smaller wings, nipping at her body and streaking orange with crimson. She angled her form between the dual streams of projectiles gouging a thousand little craters in the Eyrie's surface the entire descent.  
  
She waited still.  
  
Until the moment provided her an escape when reaching near the ground, and she opened her wings, and though she widened the target to the helicopter, it was forced to swerve from the deadly drop towards the ground and correct itself before it was too late. She had no such problem, riding the winds and taming the storm. She easily slipped underneath the blindspot of the confused craft and used the surrounding darkness and her speed to slip into the labyrinth of buildings.  
  
"...Echo Two to Hawk...we lost it..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Did she make it?!" Brooklyn snapped angrily at the electronic facade of the computer intelligence, having heard of his sister's daring flight and the carnage brought upon the building by her escape into the night. "Mother?!!"  
  
She rechecked her surrounding cameras and sensors. "I believe so."  
  
Brooklyn sighed in relief, but tinged with infuriation at an irrational stunt not associated with the once timid inventor. "Damn," he then muttered, when seeing Mother's exterior cameras catch the frenzied activity of the smaller helicopters, intensifying their search about the building and castle and angered by the fact they allowed a gargoyle to escape, "I thought I was the impetuous one. She just stirred up the hornet's nest, and if someone else tries to leave, they may not be as lucky as she was."  
  
Broadway turned to his brother. "Maybe we should escape." he offered quickly, preferring a battle, but wanting to spare his clan, his family. "Let them come, let them search an empty castle."  
  
"And go where?" Brooklyn cut back. "They know we live here, or they wouldn't have come, and we'll forever be in retreat if we don't face them now. And with our sister's little stunt, they have even more reason to believe gargoyles are here, and they won't give up until the entire building is stripped down and more innocents they deem to be traitors are killed." Brooklyn sadly shook his head, the revelation of Goliath's injuries detrimental to his spirits. "But just maybe, she can get there in time...before Sobek does any more damage." He leaned onto the desk, and sighed. "Goliath, I'm sorry...Mother, it's time to raise the shield."  
  
"I am..." She paused and flickered slightly, her expression changing to reflect a mood programmed by circuitry and hard-drives. "I am unable to activate the external shielding. Someone has blocked my access with an even higher security override."  
  
"What?!" he snapped, now suddenly deprived of his greatest defensive weapon, and his mind settled on only one person besides Goliath with the proper access. He scurried his gaze across the room, between the members of the clan and noticing an absence. "Where the hell is Xanatos?!"  
  
****************************************  
  
"...we must...stop it..." he wheezed, steering abruptly from the alleyway and into the empty street. Usually meticulously vigilant to his place and existence in the human world below lest he expose himself, Goliath now seemed indifferent to such disclosure in the face of Sobek's threat. Through the driving rain, he fell into full view to anyone who would happen to peer outside their window only to see a seven foot, seven inch gargoyle rambling past. "...Sobek...will kill...more..."  
  
"Goliath!" Elisa chased after him, determined to stop him or at least conceal him away back into the crawlways littered through the whole of Manhattan, but even she could not halt the bewildered path he stubbornly set himself upon.  
  
Dripping streams of blood down his body, leaking from underneath his makeshift bandage soaked entirely through, he lumbered on in the damnably tenacious instinct to protect now warped by fatigue, injuries and near psychosis. Elisa was nearly trampled by her own husband, the gargoyle stumbling and loosing his footing on the slick streets and collapsing against her upon a brownstone wall. She was luckily held from being crushed by Goliath's bracing arm. "Because of...me...he'll destroy..." the gargoyle whispered painfully. "I must...stop it..."  
  
"You can't do anything in your condition!" Elisa flooded air sodden by rain with a scream against him, to better drill into a singular notion that would deprive her of everything she had lived and continually risked that existence for. "Look at you!" Her hands clutched into bruised skin not to inflict pain, but for him to better heed her through the thick barrier of pain. "You're gushing blood by the bucketful! We have to get you back to the castle...or at least somewhere safe."  
  
"...I am the one...he wants..." Goliath argued, his words forced, his body trembling in the desperate need for rest and a replenishment of blood. "I am his obsession, and...even with my presence, I place those I swore to protect...in danger..." He pushed himself from the wall, and back into the dimly lit street, awash in rainwater turning dry pavement into a black stream lit in sporadic, broken streetlight amber.  
  
"Let someone else handle this! I'll call for back-up!"  
  
"No time...I must...protect..."  
  
"And die in the gutter in the process?!"  
  
"If need be..." Goliath stumbled away, over a quarter ton of weight and brawn struggling to stay on his feet, and stumbling like some drunkard through the rain outlining his contours in the spatter of sky-bred tears against flesh. "I...cannot deny who...I am..."  
  
Eyes teared, tired and blurred to the sight of her mate's obstinate march into death now reduced to a timid crawl, the injuries grievous, hemorrhaging, and slowly siphoning from him his life, spilling to the streets remnants of his soul. "You stubborn, thick-headed..." she whispered and trailed off, quickening her pace to catch his. "No wonder I fell in love with you." Goliath looked to the slender woman nudging herself into the crook beneath his arm, to aid in steadying his path. "If you're going to sacrifice your life," she affirmed, "then let me stay by your side."  
  
Goliath noticed she would not look directly at him, for if she were to meet her eyes to his own, she may decide against this.  
  
"...He is far too valiant for his own good in any century..." came another, very familiar voice through the commlink shared between the two. "...But willful, and always inflexible..."  
  
Goliath raised his eyes overhead, searching through the darkened sheathe for any silhouette that would heed his beloved sister's presence. "My s-sister?" he questioned the voice pocketed inside the tiny machine pinned to Elisa's leather coat. "Where...where are you?"  
  
"...I am almost to the building now. Before you decide to play the eternal hero, perhaps you will allow me to try instead..."  
  
****************************************  
  
It was a landing anything but graceful, the membranes of her wings compromised by holes torn by bullets, and thus, her flight was erratic and she touched to the building's barbed crown not with elegance but instead a staggered thump. "Elisa is right," she responded wearily, "you are far too important to endanger your life."  
  
Wounded, but far too vigilant in her mission, she trawled across the building she had just arrived at, searching for any sign of any such device of explosive power. The sheer amount of information in her head flowed past her eyes in a chaotic, confusing swirl, the clever sister fearfully scanning through heating vents and powerboxes upon a wide, leveled rooftop, examining each and every electric for fear it may hold inside of it Sobek's wrath.  
  
"...Sister, please..." it was Goliath, dribbling a limp response into the comm. "...Don't..."  
  
It was a curling of her fawning lips bittersweet, her brother brutally deprived of his wings but still thinking only of anyone but himself. "Rest, Goliath, conserve your strength." she replied, as an air conditioning duct was torn apart by her own two hands and yet yielded nothing. "You have suffered enough tonight."  
  
"...Please..."  
  
"You are needed far more than I." she argued. "Therefore it is better to risk my life instead of yours. I do this for you, my brother." She was bleeding from her side and wings, a golden seep through her tunic, but the pushed the pain away to better concentrate on her frantic search, allowing her recreated body to heal itself. She upturned everything, and used delicate fists to break apart metal paneling and forage a path across the tarred rooftop. She knew the Egyptian to be perhaps laughing in her hunt, the fact he brought such fear to those he wished to torment satiating a blackened heart. Perhaps it was even a hoax. But from what she had learned about Sobek, she knew this to be very, terrifyingly real.  
  
And thus her search continued, until almost every structure upon the rooftop, whether decorative or functional, had been opened by brute force. An unobtrusive panel once locked and secured against anything but a gargoyle was effectively broken open. She paused, for buried within the circuitry of a main circuit breaker, an object rested silently that served to widen ebon eyes and spark a morbid interest in the fact her hunt had revealed not an explosive as previously thought, but a small orb, it's light spilling in slow measure from the panel enclosure.  
  
"It is not a bomb," she reported into her commlink, hoping to alleviate her brother, "it is some kind of...glowing blue orb wrapped in ancient ribbon." It appeared as glass, with a surface sheen like crystal and a leisurely pulsating light centered within. The bindings tied loosely around the orb were indeed ancient, papyrus, with faded hieroglyphs. "The writing is Egyptian, I have seen it in one of the books in the library." She poked at it, the orb, curiously and thus dangerously, and with a mere touch with her talons, it flickered, and rippled like waves in a pond. The orb responded as if a piece of the ocean held in a perfect sphere and she smiled when seeing the surface wrinkles slow and eventually cease all movement, becoming completely, eerily still once more. It was warm, and so seemingly unassuming the sister would not have given it a second thought without Sobek's gloating. "I do not see what this tiny orb would be capable of..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...m-my dear lady..." he sputtered, his voice a graveled cough echoing through the hollowed cavity in his stomach. He rose shakily from the debris, his torso gutted and marred with a massive hole that placed well on display his insides and the spinal column knitting itself back together. "...you...h-have no idea..." With one hand and arm pressed across the hole to keep his organs still inside, he reached into his belt to a hidden pouch, revealing a tiny glass sphere, roughly the size of an enlarged marble. So small, and yet with the delicacy in which he held the object and the malevolent gleam in his eye, it promised so much more. Sobek released the orb with a flick of his wrist, and it fell to the ground and shattered. A magical trigger. "Boom."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...Boom..."  
  
"My sister," placid fear turned to wild panic, as Goliath snatched the commlink from Elisa when hearing Sobek's single cryptic taunt, and pleaded to his clever sister, "get out...GET OUT!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
"...GET OUT!!!..."  
  
The dimmed orb now grew furious with light, a deep ocean cresting blue pulsating and swelling and coating the sister's pumpkin flesh in a swaddling of abrasive cobalt. Triggered by Sobek from several blocks away, one orb to another through a mystical link forged through magic, the sheer power compressed into the orb was allowed to breathe. And with the flowing drapery of yellowed bandage stolen from a sarcophagus, the energies mingled and merged and created from an essence lingering for thousands of years a tidal wave of energy.  
  
The lost sister was unable to defend herself from a sudden discharge of fire and energy spreading outwardly in all directions. Her hands splayed to protect her from the fire turning white and stripping her of all senses, she could almost swear she could see through her skin, her bones turning black and charred. Memories wrapped within a blanket of warm emotion, a life lived and a love lost flashed before her as her skin took head on the brunt of the equivalent of nearly half a ton of dynamite. "Goliath," she whispered, moments before everything went black, "I love you..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...Goliath, Izzzzhhrrrkkkk......" A moment of serenity, of calm before the storm, of a dignified beauty the building held as it towered above them. Imperial, outdated from the modern structures, but holding a resilient grace its own, until a small, vivid spark rippled through the windows on the top floors. They exploded outwards in columns of fire colored an eerie Caribbean blue, and instantly, was the building engulfed in an explosion that shook the ground and burned the very air. Blinding light first, then a deafening shockwave followed in a ring expanding outwards, and when having recovered from the initial blast that struck even them far below, Goliath and Elisa stared into a fiery threshold torn open into oblivion. The flames blackened by oily smoke curled and distorted, and emerging from the chaos an enormous humanoid shape, born from fire and devastation, and gorging itself on the sheer energy released. A strange being with a stiff, forked tail, a long gaunt body, and a tapering snout tested the air with his claws. Huge erect ears and protruding eyes, it was far from any creature ever seen and created from an almost transparent energy emitting a bright blue glow.  
  
Like a baby born without any skin, a like a soul being puked up from the depths of hell, it bellowed a scream never meant to be heard by mankind, spread across the yawning field of stars before it with an ancient rage left to fester within the sands and a feeble collection of scrounged artifacts. For he was known once as Set, the Egyptian god of anger, and with a temporary rebirth into this realm of mortals, he took from Goliath a precious jewel, his clever sister.  
  
Goliath watched spellbound a consuming explosion that nearly atomized the top three floors, leaving no chance for survivors. He shook violently as the realization soon hit him, and he opened up his lungs and let loose a cry that echoed across the buildings, an eruption of rage and sorrow vomited from his chest and released into the humid, damp air.  
  
****************************************  
  
It nearly severed the digital frequency in the sheer power being channeled through the commlink, as Sobek bathed in the rapture that was Goliath's tortured, hollow shriek. It was bliss, a narcotic to him, experiencing Goliath's continuing pain and he wished if he could only gut the Wyvern gargoyle and bath in his blood. But that would, of course, end his fun far too prematurely. "Piece...by piece." he rasped into the commlink. "What a twisted web that weaves when chaos infuses into order. I will destroy everything you hold dear, Goliath, including your precious protectorate."  
  
He could see from his vantage atop the steps outside of the church, the distant building engulfed in mystical flame, only to split apart and give way to the glowing blue figure of Set, one of the most powerful gods from his homeland given new form and predatory function. Impassively, he slipped from his belt matching orbs and let them play and roll in the palm of his hand, the curved surfaces reflecting the strands of light crossing through the clouds above. "Hmmm," he thought aloud, pondering a choice, "Goliath did hold up his end of the bargain. And to not show the same courtesy would truly be," the tiny orbs casually slipped between his fingers and fell to the wet concrete below, shattering upon impact and triggering the release of their distant halves, "evil."  
  
Four more skyscrapers in Manhattan surrounding the church exploded into the same fire that bred Set, almost in perfect, successive chorus. Storm versus storm, fire versus lightning, a rising, irresistible force against an impenetrable, immovable object coalesced frighteningly into pieces torn away, allowing a split second glimpse into Hell itself. More blue fire caused four more fierce detonations, and four more massive figures to be birthed into the tempestuous skies of Manhattan.  
  
****************************************  
  
They could barely see from their confines of the city, concealing them into the safety of the hollows of an urban landscape. Goliath and Elisa were too helpless, too small to even grasp what action they could take to aid their wounded city against an unimaginable prospect, war against gods reborn.  
  
"...Such beauty, do they not possess?..." Sobek's voice cooed from the commlink, hoping to further erode in any way Goliath's precarious sanity. "...Such power, do they not hold. I once in jest christened them godbombs. They are made by infusing a personal artifact from each of the ancient Egyptian gods with the orbs' powers, and bring to life a small essence of that god. But how long the energy will last to keep them in this existence is unknown..."  
  
He swung his fist through the nearest streetlight, severing the pole in half in a swipe driven by anger and loss, and spilling a shower of sparks to the ground when the pole flickered and toppled. Goliath fell, and huddled and wept for the apparent loss of his sister. Elisa stared towards where Set started the slow, destructive descent towards the ground, and echoing within her heart an emptiness, and a vulnerability to the horrors of all creation having poured out of the depths of supernatural fire. "You son of a bitch..." she whispered, her eyes transfixed in a dulled stare towards the building being demolished from the top down, a grave marked by a ring of fallen debris for the restored sister. "What have you unleashed?"  
  
"...They are gods forgotten by those who once prayed to them, and killed each other in wars that took millions for them. And thus they are angry, and driven by one instinct alone...kill all humans..."  
  
****************************************  
  
Seductive, where men once fell in droves before her in a crazed, carnal haze and offered to kill if only to please her, to make her full lips curve and breathe to them a whisper of appreciation. Sheathed in translucent robes baring almost her entire form willingly to admiring onlookers, the graceful figure of woman melded with the striking features of a jungle cat in crackling, azure energy. Tufts of sultry fur lined her shoulders, legs and back, and the long tail swaying across the building's facade. She swept her legs across her throne, curling temptingly and luxuriously around the towering structure from which she was birthed, surveying a new land to bring to its knees underneath her. Those within the building she claimed as her throne grew sick, emaciated, and were fallen by just her presence.  
  
For she was Sakmet, a hybrid of woman and feline, a seductress, and the bringer of plague and pestilence.  
  
****************************************  
  
He arched his broad, strapping back, and planted both feet into a precarious balance atop the edges of the tapered rooftop, crumbling under his weight. Donned in ancient Egyptian warrior garb, and wearing a bearded grimace that reciprocated an intensity to rival the storms, he stood and flexed his new if perhaps temporary frame. Beneath his helmet, eyes drawn inwards radiated the same energy that formed him, and he peered down to the masses scrambling desperately from the falling chunks of brick and mortar. A great spear swelled from his palm, extending into a formidable weapon, and he readied for a battle he thirsted for since disposed and forgotten by modern times.  
  
For he was Septu, a warrior, a tyrant, and the god of war.  
  
****************************************  
  
Her great paws sprouted talons to better rend the steel and brick of the building her sleek physique had exploded outwards from, and she curled all too comfortably along the highest floors, brushing her body against and crushing any superficial embellishment. She mewed like distant thunder, her belly caressing a growl through its entire, nubile length, and she bared her fangs and crowed a guttural snarl into the winds. Her elegant, stealthy shape fashioned from sparkling ocean-hued energy, bursting with an occasional flare of blue fire, she lashed her tail and severed the building's highest floors in a single swipe, and reveled in the devastation caused so casually.  
  
For she was Menhit, a lioness, a beast, and the goddess of destruction.  
  
****************************************  
  
Its form coiled around the great spire, a kinetic, azure radiance secreted from its scaled hide, to better flaunt the fact it was made from the energy of a simple dusty relic and a negligent humanity. As if the building were its prey, the serpent spawned from magic wrapped its long, bulbous body around the smooth, faceted surfaces of the skyscraper and tightened, crushing the glass panes mirroring the angry storms, and twisting the iron beams that held such a monstrosity the sky. Under such immense pressure, windows shattered and exploded outward in a deadly rainfall of shard, walls imploded, and the very frame crafted from riveted steel twisted, dooming the building to collapse.  
  
For he was Apep, a serpent, a hunter, and the god of chaos.  
  
****************************************  
  
Manhattan quickly descended into bedlam and turmoil under an equally furious storm, with the five readymade gods toppling their respective birthplaces to better follow on a single, powerful instinct. They lowered into the streets, and swathed a path of destruction with their towering size. The great snake Apep callously snapped the building it coiled around in two perfect halves, condemning it to a broken stump littered by rubble, and moved on directly into traffic, completely crushing the cars screeching to a sudden halt underneath its great bulk. Septu attacked all that lay in his path, ripping open entire buildings as he silently waged war upon the modern structures rising to his impressive height and beyond, as Menhit bound past him across the rooftops, swiping her claws against any target she deemed worthy of a hunt.  
  
And the creature who brought them back to a flawed, transitory existence merely watched, and drowned in the unified chorus of terrified screams of city dwellers fading into the storms.  
  
Sobek in turn felt the strength returning to his body, and restoring the massive chasm to a lean, repaired torso, though he was indebted to admit Goliath had indeed done incredible damage. Perhaps this was the basis of his true infatuation, to have a worthy foe stand against him at every turn, and simply continue to up the ante with each encounter. And what better to drive a mind unhindered by a soul to persist in such a game, than the fact it will always provide a challenge and a macabre thrill. Sobek smiled, spurred by that very promise.  
  
"I am coming for you, Goliath," he warned the couple on the opposite side of the commlink, wherever they may be, "and your whore." He screamed, and howled and using his great strength threw his arm through an exterior support beam in the front of the church, and another, and another, until the entire structure itself was too weak to support the lasting remnants of roof resting atop. As he nonchalantly descended the steps, beams snapped and walls fragmented and it crumbled from front to back, leaving a plume of dust to erupt outwards and devour the sunken cathedral completely. He left behind a pile of rain-soaked rubble and the skeletal remains of the few beams that would not stubbornly fall, and stalked into the streets of Manhattan, following the spattered trail of blood and the sweet fragrance it gave off. "I have not enjoyed a hunt for a very long time."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Mother, get me visual!! NOW!!!" Brooklyn screamed his order to the hologram, as she complied and allowed him to view outside of his prison. The exterior cameras were able to focus in on five massive forms tearing apart an entire city block. "Jesus..." he gasped, his city being destroyed around him and he unable to lift a damned finger to help.  
  
"Brooklyn," Angela wheezed helplessly, leaning into Broadway's chest to better support her form lest she collapse from shock, "what do we do?"  
  
His brow drooped on lifeless eyes. "I...I don't know..." he stuttered. "I've never seen anything like this..."  
  
"Brooklyn." It was Mother, being the bearer of yet more devastating news. "The Guild has landed their first helicopter near the courtyard, another on the landing pad." The clan looked at each other, some nervously, and anxiously fingering weapons sheathed to their sides. "They are unloading troops."  
  
"Then this is it." Brooklyn took center, and allowed all eyes to fall on him, allowed the brunt of leadership knowing they now looked to him and depended upon a single command. "No more death or destruction. We play it nice until they push us too far and we make a stand here, and defend our home." He planted a clenched fist into his other palm, a snap of thick flesh and a show of force to bolster his troops. "Here it comes, people. This is what we've been waiting for."  
  
****************************************  
  
Caked in blood still flowing freely from the vertically torn slit opened down her stomach, Dr. Pierce pressed the surgical gauze into Rose's gash, hoping to sway the languid seep of blood from her insides, the sheer volume a clear indication of severe internal bleeding. She had never appeared more frail, or more delicate than now, being stripped of her robes and her scarred flesh bared to any open eye. But she was too weak to hide her disfigurement away, or to even consider her wound in the face of the young man hovering over her, his hand clutching her so very hard as to ensure she would not fade away from him.  
  
As Annika continued to slash and peel the blood-soaked robes from the nun, Todd pulled Rose's cowl away, to reveal her long, lengthy tress of dark mahogany, littering in a leisurely curl about her shoulders. He wiped the blood away from the edges of her mouth with a moist cloth, and traced his knuckles down the edge of her brow to soothe his cherished caretaker. "You're going to be okay, do you hear me?" he whispered softly, though defiant in tone, providing her the strength she would need to survive. "You're going to be alright..."  
  
But with a surprising swiftness both relieving and terrifying to Todd, Rose snatched upon an arm to his using the last reserves of energy quickly dwindling in her form, her slender fingers tightening onto the cold, steel surface of the Epsilon armor's hide. "...todd..." she gasped, her voice all but submerged in the fluids drowning her lungs, and she churned her garbled words as best she could. Her eyes were wild, so clear and lucid and brimming with a fright Todd had never seen. "...I must tell you...if I die..."  
  
"You're not going to die!!" he yelled back, enfolding her offered hand in the crafted claws of cold technology. "Not tonight, not ever!!"  
  
"...please..." she pleaded to be heard, having trouble remaining conscious, exhausted with the loss of blood and soaking the bedsheets of the hospital stretcher a pale wine. "...you must know...the truth..."  
  
Todd shook his head, misunderstanding of what could strike such fear into her heart. "Rose, what truth? What is it?"  
  
"...I am...your mother..."  
  
****************************************  
  
He had lived through several wars between factions, and family, and brothers having built their kingdoms from nothing and embroiled the entire planet in such battles that consumed all who were unfortunate to be caught in the middle. Now history was repeating, the city was under direct assault by deities both foreign and possessed only of deadly instinct. They would follow their baser natures until extinguished of their borrowed power. "His insanity is beyond calculating." whispered the aide decamp, Owen Burnett watching from his employer's office through the massive window wall the gods below tear paths of destruction through the city. "And be damned my limitations."  
  
"One snap of Puck's fingers and all the monsters disappear?" came another voice into the silence.  
  
Owen looked over his shoulder, and found the billionaire dressed for battle, his new armor molded to his frame and perhaps assuring his presence in the heat of the battle to come. "Mr. Xanatos." He turned back, the Puck inside screaming for release against the aura of such incredible energy. "I never knew even Sobek was capable of this."  
  
His eyes thinned as he stood behind the impeccably clothed majordomo, skirting from the urban, lighted landscape to Owen's pale skin rising above his starched jacket collar. "I can assure you he's absolutely insane." he agreed icily. "Can these things be stopped?"  
  
Owen's eyes flashed sapphire for an instant behind his glasses, the presence of fay wanting to burst from this mortal disguise. "I truly don't know." an honest answer, with no wintry bravado he frequently preached. "The gargoyles are no match."  
  
"What about you?"  
  
"Even I would have trouble. They are brimming with energy so fantastic, it rivals anything I've seen besides that of Oberon or queen Titania...except for one, but he's far too young to face these creatures." A shudder passed through him, and he recognized the unwanted emotion as apprehension, perhaps even fear. "I wish we had the resources of Infiniti." He wished only she could break the similar limitations of her own powers, to aid them, to aid her gargoyles. His heart longed for her, and her council, the Puck wanting for a kindred spirit in a time of war. "I wish she were here..."  
  
Xanatos nodded solemnly, and released from his armored forearm a long syringe, stabbing outwards from a hidden compartment. He damned himself for what he was about to do, and what he was perchance about to condemn his city to. "You'll join her soon enough, Owen."  
  
"Mr. Xanatos, what...?"  
  
"I'm sorry, old friend." Before Owen even had the chance to turn and question the odd statement, Xanatos plunged the long needle into the back of his friend's neck, injecting the entirety of a blackened silver fluid into his blood. "But I can't have you ruining everything with your heightened senses."  
  
Owen's breath was instantly stolen, as was the chance to scream in pain, as his blood was set aflame, his veins and arteries rising to the surface of his skin and turning an odd grayish hue. His already pale flesh grew white, pallid and sickly, and Owen Burnett collapsed backwards into Xanatos' arms.  
  
"There are greater forces at work, Owen, than you could surely understand." The billionaire scooped the limp man into his arms and headed towards the far door hidden into the wall. "Security access: Xanatos, David." A panel opened, and a red lens appeared, an eye burning mechanical scarlet and awaiting confirmation. Xanatos leaned down to match his eyes to the lens, and a retinal scanner verified his identity. The door opened to the side, and he stepped into a small, steel cab. An elevator. "The Vault." he stated simply, and the cab powered to attention, lurched and dropped into the bowels of the Eyrie. The door at last opened after a quick journey, and he was met with yet another doorway at the end of a sterilized sterling hall, massive, thick and silently, menacingly boasting its power to keep anything from penetrating its titanium construction. "Voiceprint verification." Xanatos announced clearly. "Xanatos, David."  
  
The door shuddered and split down the center, removing itself slowly from his path to grant the billionaire access to a large chamber lined with gleaming steel, a private vault in which he protected his greatest treasures, and held his greatest secrets. He carried Owen inside past golden crowns, jewels and ancient statues, and immediately felt the eyes of an unusual prisoner follow his every movement, burning through him and condemning wordlessly.  
  
She peered down on him from her entrapment, with eyes deep emerald and flared with bitter, resentful fire. "What have you done to him?!" she snarled, fighting against her bindings with increased resilience when seeing the lifeless form of Owen Burnett being laid to a hospital stretcher and mercilessly strapped down.  
  
"I have injected his blood with nanobots constructed from an iron alloy," Xanatos answered, binding his friend's arms and legs with heavy leather straps, and delicately removing his glasses in respect, the man wheezing for breath, "and I assure you, they are designed to only weaken him, not kill him."  
  
Velvety cream skin bruised and reddened where her wrists and ankles were secured, and even with her powerful magic, the technology suckled the energy from her as fast as she could produce it. A massive steel ring held her in place, her appendages outstretched and pulled taught to limit any movement. "Why are you doing this?" she asked of him, fire burning her voice.  
  
Xanatos turned to the entrapped gargoyle, staring upwards towards Infiniti with a gaze clouded of emotion, obscuring the guilt twisting his chest. "You are the semi-omnipotent, all-seeing guardian spirit." A cold response, bred with a breath visible in the air. "You tell me."  
  
Infiniti narrowed her glare. "My senses have been somehow dulled by your bothersome technology. But my first guess is that you are being coerced, for I believe you would never betray the clan."  
  
Xanatos scoffed, a chuckle having escaped from his throat. "You thought wrong, my dear Infiniti."  
  
The massive steel ring suspended above the floor by thick, connecting cables and conduits was suddenly gorged with a burst of energy she released in her anger, ironically being fed directly into the Eyrie's power systems. It held and stole from her enough power to feed the entire building ten times over, and with her continued resistance, she expunged much. "It seems I was far too trusting. But I will soon break these bonds, David Xanatos," she warned with a growl, "and in reprimand for causing harm to my gargoyles, you shall burn in the tempest of my magicks."  
  
Xanatos nodded simply, a deal with the devil he knew would condemn his soul. "I know."  
  
"And what about Alexander? He could be killed..."  
  
Xanatos paused, and closed his eyes to the mere mention of his son, in more danger than anyone could ever realize. "You and I both know Alexander is far beyond any mortal concerns." he then seethed, bracing his argument beyond what even this immortal spirit could even fathom.  
  
"Then why?" It was a softer tone, to plead to a better remnant she knew to be suppressed inside of the billionaire.  
  
"Sacrifices must be made, my dear Infiniti." Xanatos took his leave, and allowed a bare whisper of his voice to filter through the cavernous chamber and echo across the walls as the massive doors closed behind him. "Sacrifices must be made."  
  
****************************************  
  
He touched to the stones ancient before this land was even tamed, and a jolt traveled the length of his spine in an aversion to his entering deep within enemy territory. The winds were wild and angry, and tried to push the intruder from his triumphant ascent onto Wyvern's wide courtyard. He was witness to the sheer, awe-inspiring beauty of an architectural masterpiece, pieced together and spared the ravages of oblivion by modern technology and millions of dollars rising to an astronomical cost after eight long years.  
  
He was almost impressed.  
  
His eyes behind the frosted white slits of his mask were searching, and cautious bordering on paranoid of surroundings far too peaceful. He noticed to the side the famed statues resting atop the cornices and staring out into a horizon marked by clouds, and perhaps the very reason the rumors had submerged from the depths of urban legend and myth, plaguing the reputation of Wyvern. He walked towards the closest, a guardian frozen in ferocious stance, and noticed the rain did not touch the surface and instead fell completely through. He waved a hand through the statue when questioning their solidity, flickering slightly, a hologram, and nodded in the subtle attempt to sway the hunters. "A novel try."  
  
Black turned to the others unloading from the helicopters, almost half of the Guild's forces having taken to the castle surface. They seemed an army, each a perfect duplicate of their comrades with matching suits, the sharp contrast dulled by the falling rain. Their masks presented more than just soldiers but warriors on some holy quest, and following a single man no better than they were in status or physical form, but by his simple words they made a doctrine and they heeded unquestioningly to protect their families and loved ones. He watched them continue to disembark, now allowing the third helicopter to land on the designated pad on a level below him and serve to add to their already impressive ranks.  
  
"Greetings," a voice breathed in the winds, "welcome to castle Wyvern."  
  
Black pulled the guns strapped to either side of his torso within the long jacket, and swerved to aim them towards a tone far too amiable in the presence of an army invading.  
  
With nothing but a long, flowing sleeveless dress to protect her from the brunt of the storm raging just above them, a human woman had materialized as if from magic. It was Mother, altering her holographic appearance to disguise her true gargoyle ancestry. "How may I be of assistance?"  
  
Two heavyweight Super VP-8s, long-barreled and dual-clipped, were held remarkably motionless towards the woman, as Black studied the casual arrival behind him intensely, the rain passing through her as it did the statues. "Where are the creatures?" he demanded coolly.  
  
Mother tilted her head to the side. "Creatures?" she echoed innocently.  
  
"Please don't play coy with me, ma'am." he addressed her politely, though knowing she was as false as the statues lining the cornices and tallest turret above. "Now, I'm only going to ask once. Where are the gargoyles you are hiding in this castle?"  
  
Mother shook her head. "I am sorry, but this castle is empty of any presence save for Mr. Xanatos, and he has several concerns regarding you and your colleagues trespassing on his property."  
  
A smile disguised behind his mask, Black deemed the approach of this hologram as a very clever stratagem. "We have been watching this castle for weeks now, and from the recent activities of even more, we know an entire clan roosts here. Or was the recent escape of the orange female just a trick of the storm?"  
  
Mother raised her eyebrows, thin and delicately arched upwards, a trait granted when her appearance was altered to human. "I am sorry," whispered the hologram, walking to the water fountain and resting her form of projected photons to the louvered edge forming a bench, "but I think you are mistaken."  
  
He was quickly losing patience, annoyed to the fact she was blatantly lying to him. "Either you tell us," he hissed, the geniality all but lost to infuriation, "or we move in by force."  
  
Mother appeared to release a sigh into the air, perhaps displeased in her attempts to sway them. "They seem...determined, Brooklyn," she reported to the leader waiting just inside the walls, "I see no other choice."  
  
"...Nor do I..." replied Brooklyn. "...Do what you have to, Mother..."  
  
"As you wish." It seemed as if the entire castle shuddered, and from stone came metal, birthed from ancient Scottish granite emerged modern armaments. From either curved wall or buttressed crown, almost every turret opened up a hidden panel on their blemished surface, and the stone recessed and slid away, revealing massive, double-barreled guns on hydraulic arms, each mechanically brandishing a laser targeting sight and shrouding the entire castle in searching crimson beams. Within the Eyrie hangar below, the entire line of Steel Clan robots powered up one by one in precise succession, and the ceiling dropped from automated launch racks the Cyber-Biotics drones, unfurling and powering and waking from a slumber readied for battle. The bay door opened only a crack to allow the machines to escape into the sky, rising up into the smoky heavens of the surrounding turrets and encircling the Guild members spread out across the entire castle exterior and the two attack helicopters holding their rigid aerial pattern.  
  
The Guild members were now surrounded by weaponry far sophisticated then anything ever seen or expected in this medieval place, and following each and every movement of the suited invaders were the weapons, both stationary and hovering around them, and awaiting their chance. Black held to his own guns, seeing an easy victory devolve into something much more costing with the mechanical creations each choosing a target. "You're armed well." he yielded to the impressive display, as Mother noticed the faint traces of well-concealed apprehension. "You do realize we're going to do everything in our power to ensure the destruction of the gargoyles here."  
  
"Yes," Mother conceded all too smugly, "I know."  
  
  
To be continued... 


	2. Red Sands Part 2: War

Author's Note: To Helen Fegan and 'Cat', if you're still out there, the e-mail addresses you gave me for my posting list are no longer valid. I need new ones if you still want the posting update messages. And while I'm here, if there's anyone out there who wants to be added to my posting list, just let me know, and give me an e-mail address where you will receive a message when I've posted my latest. And yeah, yeah, I'm already hearing the " ...if that guy ever posts at all..." mumbling from behind your computer screen. Hey! I'm busy, damnit! And these are big stories!  
  
78 - "Red Sands Part 2: War"  
  
Emerald green beheld an ocean, aimlessly drifting in a calm, misted crest. They were eyes reflective of infancy and innocence, yet deep within the lucid jade burned a power beyond any mortal wisdom and experience, and nestled within the chubby, often-soiled palms of a mere human child. Ancient stone blurring in a furious stride, and distant portals, etched into the jigsaw pattern of the castle walls and holding behind sealed barriers the breath of nature, brushed across the glassy Hunter surface of his eyes, with feathery strands of brilliant fire nodding up and down in time with his step.  
  
Alexander followed his mother down the corridor, his gaze directed elsewhere, and vacant, as if he sensed something greater. Fay blood fused with human now clashed and fought, and its long velvety journey through his veins now became coarse, almost wanting to burst from the winding trails through his diminutive body. It bubbled within his throat, and confused the child with the taste of dust and death having come from nowhere.  
  
The call was strong, the voice was infusing into a subconscious ruled by dreams of toys and games and the scent of confection. There was a sensation of not yet pain, but a hollow chill having spread through his torso and eyes that unnerved him. And Alexander Xanatos did not like being unnerved.  
  
"Hurry up, Alex." intruded a voice that somehow, though soft, and unassuming, won out over what crawled and scraped with the frigid touch of invisible talons inside the base of his skull. It was Fox, holding back her rapid stride in order for her son, who trailed behind with a stare turned vacuous, to catch up. The former television star held a young Trinity to her chest, and aimed with a maddening purpose towards the castle's main computer room.  
  
"Let me go!"  
  
Fox barely allowed the adjoining, argumentative tone to bother her, with so much threatening to bring destruction all around them. She merely tightened her grip on the slender arm and dragged a squirming, stubborn woman behind her.  
  
"Oh come on!" she whined, a voice shimmied through a willowy neck and transformed into a shrill complaint. A tenor melodiously feminine, meant in all purpose to swan lightly across the air, though now coming across as an incessantly annoying shriek. "This is scoop of the century!! The gargoyles versus the Guild. If I'm going to be locked up here, I might as well take advantage!"  
  
Fox sneered, curling pouting lips into a feline growl. "Advantage of a battle that may just decide the fate of an entire clan?!" she snapped back, dragging Nicole St. John by the wrist, forcing the young woman to follow.  
  
Nicole fumed, "Excuse me for trying to make the best of my illegal imprisonment." She dug her heels into the floor bringing both women to an abrupt halt, with Fox nearly spilling the young, winged hybrid onto the stones. "But I'm a reporter, and I have..."  
  
"A duty to report the truth." Fox finished, none too impressed with the constant drone Nicole often produced, thinking she was indeed capable of spouting truth and justice and any other excuse she could get to highlight her name in the media spotlight. "I heard the speech about justifying exposing the clan before." she hissed, caressing a snarl through her throat and an emerald fire in her eyes. "That's probably more detrimental to them than even the Guild."  
  
"How will anyone ever know what has happened up here without proof?" argued Nicole. "And proof that isn't doctored by the bad guys?"  
  
"Or doctored by you..." the billionairess offered, eliciting a wrinkle running through Nicole's features. "Besides, step outside and you're immediately labeled a traitor. You want a bullet through the stomach like Maria or through the head like Sara?" she passed to her a horrifying visual, the reporter having seen firsthand the death of Sara Jasper. The stench of blood and analgesic that had clung to her dreams, and twisted them into nightmares, and what Nicole had to fight so hard to cleanse herself of in order to stay objective. "Passing off your disappearance was easy enough," Fox continued, wrenching her long nails into Nicole's wrist, a trick learned from her past training to force compliance, "but explaining how a barely famous reporter was killed inside our home will be a little more problematic."  
  
Dusky eyes widened, to the reality of her situation, and to Fox's purposeful iciness towards her. "That's not funny."  
  
"It wasn't meant to be. The only reason I'm trying so hard to safeguard your pathetic existence is to further spare this family unwanted attention." Fox lowered a thin brow. "Ironic, isn't it?"  
  
"Interesting choice of words, Fox. You consider those creatures family?"  
  
"You're damned right I do!!" snarled the billionairess, almost insulted, as Trinity felt the tremor rippling through her carrier's chest in the power of her bellows. "And if you do anything to harm them in any way," Fox turned and yanked Nicole close, risking her own clandestinely ailing health when allowing her temper to flair, her blood to run hot, "you will see just how powerful my money and stature really are when you completely disappear from the face of this planet."  
  
Nicole relented slightly and allowed Fox to guide her on, swallowing the boorish remark readily poised on the tip of her tongue. "Maybe I'll stay inside for now..."  
  
"About time you proved humanity at least has SOME intelligence."  
  
"Auntie Fox?" Trinity then chirped, slowing Fox's stride with an inquiring twitter, and ending a war between two stormfronts equally powerful and threatening a war themselves. "Where mommy an' daddy?"  
  
Fox soothed a moistened breath through full lips, "They're...coming home soon, Trini." She wove a false truth, if only to spare her charge the reality in which her father had suffered.  
  
Nicole noticed Fox's hand fall away from her arm, to stroke gently the ebony strands of hair draped like a midnight mountain cascade over the child's elusively horned brow and face, and shoulders wrapped in chocolate wing. The fact the entire clan had been informed of Goliath's condition through their commlinks, the fact he had endured such massive injuries, and in turn suffered a child's heart, barely served to tip the scales in which she weighed her choice of approval or condemnation. "Does Trinity know about Goliath?" she whispered to Fox.  
  
"No." she answered flatly. "How do you tell a girl not even two years old that her daddy's been maimed?" As Fox approached the door to the main computer room, she placed her hand to the identification pad and allowed the security system to breed a thin shaft of light traveling across her palm and fingerprints. "Front page material, huh, Nic?"  
  
"Cheap shot, Fox."  
  
Fox merely pushed the reporter through the opened door, and into a darkness both tepid and having engulfed the windowless chamber. "Just get inside." Fox ordered, turning to search for her son, his presence lacking once more as he had drifted from her side. "Alex!"  
  
He was standing across from her, somnolent, slowly training a weary pair of eyes to the lights above as if to look out beyond the layers of ancient stone. Beyond the skeleton welded from girders of steel holding together a structure venerable and well beyond its life expectancy, and the darkened, churning veil of stormclouds to see the stars with blessed faerie sight.  
  
"Alex..." Her tone withered and trailed to but a whisper when realizing her child, the blood of queen Titania and the purebred genes of the Xanatos lineage taken human form, was sensing something far more than the impending battle above. And soon, his gaze traveled lethargically around and eventually settled upon her, and as if an electrical shock a chill ran the entire length of her spine with a chilled, eerie flame when under his dissecting scrutiny. It was as if he was somehow peering directly into her soul with abilities beyond simple tricks of levitation and removing souls, and she wondered, if he truly knew what ailed her. "Let's go, kiddo," she prompted quickly, reaching a hand towards him and splaying her fingers to tempt the child to her side, "we have to get inside."  
  
"How come?"  
  
"It's safer inside."  
  
"Because of the bad men?"  
  
"Yeah," Fox echoed, treating a child as almost an equal in intelligence but with the lexis he would favor, "the bad men."  
  
Her fingers stroked the empty air in a gesture beckoning towards him, and Alex fanned away the dribblings of hair having escaped across his brow and into his eyes, seemingly hesitant in being constrained. Fox contorted her features for but a split second and yet Alex still picked up on the vestiges of frustration she would flaunt. With the comparable power of a nuclear winter held just beneath a swathing of fragile flesh, he yielded the distant impression of pain and sadistic ecstasy for his mother. "Kay." he relented far too reluctantly, his voice traced with the hollowed concave of magic. He stepped through the arched threshold of darkness contrasted by severe artificial light, and Fox sealed the doorway with the heavy steel barrier sliding into place, trapping the foursome within the secured chamber almost directly in the middle of the castle.  
  
Placing Trinity into the massive leather chair, the child suddenly aware of the lingering scent of her father and thus calmed some when surrounded by his aroma swirling in an unseen haze, Fox turned around and quickly roused to life the slumbering machines with a single command.  
  
"Did I mention I'm slightly claustrophobic?" Nicole whined, the reporter roving eyes still cognizant of a room she had never been allowed access until the most extreme of circumstance.  
  
"Shut up, St. John." Fox waved her hands over the computer keyboard and powered the numerous monitors, to gain a better vantage to what was happening outside, spurred by the faint traces of yet another terrifying sound confused with thunder. "I'm trying to get a visual outside."  
  
As Alexander drifted towards Trinity, the young hybrid cloaking her small form within the leather suede of her wings, Nicole noticed a distant thrumming over the low drone of the massive computer banks. "You hear that?" she whispered. "Sounds like...gunfire..."  
  
****************************************  
  
Fire erupted, thunder swayed, the volleys were in perfect, metallic sync and spilled over the edges of the parapets an angry scream, echoing for miles when danced across the dark ocean of swirling, lightning-streaked clouds. They scattered, and hid as best they could in a yawning courtyard slick and precarious and crossed with trails of fire and energy. The Wyvern weaponry controlled by a singular mind, a consciousness born and bred by wires and cold computer banks interlaced with the most modern of technology, teased their aim towards the Guild members, weaving deadly shots almost playfully past the fragile human flesh.  
  
They stopped suddenly and huffed a breath of smoke into the air from hot barrels, allowing the Guild to hide themselves as best they could.  
  
"Those were warning shots." warned Mother, standing and drifting mechanically, ethereally towards the Guild member she deemed the leader, being the only one who dared speak and now edged up in safety against a hollowed crevasse. "I assure you, the next volley will not."  
  
Beneath the featureless mask of dark intent, he licked dry lips made so by the mechanical breathing system feeding filtered, tasteless air. "What makes you think such toys will rid you of our presence?!" he shouted from his hiding place, as the guns shivered in almost a human anxiety, and darted upon their hydraulic arms with sophisticated sensors hunting for any moving, humanoid target. Some hid successfully, others held an uncertain and risky stalemate with their own guns, similar to Black's large, long firearms, held against the cannons. "I have almost two hundred soldiers unloaded, and plenty more ready to give their lives!"  
  
Mother lifted her light-bred body from the fountain, drifting into the center of the courtyard. The targeting lasers of the guns passed through the matronly hologram and continued their acquisition of the first wave of Guild soldiers, numbering nearly a hundred and fifty, and the brunt backed against a lower level platform opening into a backdrop of low-lying, lavender mists. "If you have not noticed by now, this castle is well-prepared to defend itself."  
  
"As are we." he spit, rising from the cloak of shadows he used to conceal himself from the weaponry now idle, but nonetheless threatening to his forces.  
  
"I give you a choice," Mother continued, "leave now, or face destruction. I do not wish to harm anyone, unless I am left with no alternative."  
  
Black surveyed the situation with the eyes of a commander and strategist, playing the power of his forces against weaponry he was perhaps only partially expecting. The hidden cannons had opened up unto almost every main section of the exterior concourse, and his two attack helicopters held a rigid pattern surrounded by twenty steel clan robots and the Cyber-Biotics drones. Any other man would perhaps concede defeat in order to safeguard the men and women under him. Any other man, without a purpose spurred by death and pain. "Like the crusades a thousand years before, my dear lady," Black responded crystal clear, even with a stream of crimson laser having found a target upon his chest, "our quest is deemed almost sacred. And thus, it shall be followed through without hesitation."  
  
"You are blind," Mother stated firmly, "and outgunned three to one."  
  
The mask concealed a smile, unbeknownst to the computer generated entity Black had every reason to believe he could still win this fight, even in the face of such revealed weaponry. "You don't actually think I would bring destruction to three hundred of my people, do you?" he swathed lightly, a voice beguiling and tinged endlessly with arrogance. "Without a trump card?" Mother watched him, as he slowly moved from the crook having disguised his form and kept him from being the target of the Wyvern guns. His arms were held upwards, but however prepared to defend himself. "We now know the extent of your defenses, and thus, can now demonstrate ours."  
  
A bright strip revealed itself along both of his forearms, and a sophisticated circuitry crackled with swelling energy. The strips charged on each of the Guild members' jackets, and expanded outwards into translucent shields, and a glaze of energy formfitting to their clothing and skin. The helicopters hovering just beyond the cornices and surrounded by the aerial defenses glimmered, a sheeting of energy coating the sleek steel hides. Even the rain slid off from these protecting buffers, but in pure technological fashion, Mother merely computed the new variable among a thousand others floating through her computer banks.  
  
"I am sorry," she revealed, forging an emotion as best she could to mimic sadness, "I am programmed to cherish all forms of life, but I am also programmed to safeguard this clan at ANY cost." Her weaponry stealthily targeted the larger groups huddled together and activating their shields, and she moved the aerial forces hovering above into a more encompassing position as if a chessboard. The pieces falling well into place. "One last chance."  
  
"The beasts are here," Black countered, "and thus we fight."  
  
"Interesting creed. I hope it is worth your deaths."  
  
"To rid the world of those who threaten it," Black released a hardened breath through the slits in his mask, and aimed his guns towards the nearest cannon turret, "it is." He pulled the triggers, unleashing a hail of deadly gunfire and signaling to the rest of his forces to commence. Nearly two hundred men and women, their dark suits sheathed in energy, opened up a loud, piercing fire from their hands towards the Wyvern defenses. Unassuming firearms, both bullets and energy beams alike, penetrated stone and steel far too deeply to be of standard issue, and in seconds, a few drones above and an entire cannon were rendered useless.  
  
Mother hesitated, but seeing the damage wrought on both the courtyard and in the air, the attack craft slicing through the steel clan, the advanced robots unable to pierce the energy shields the helicopters boasted. Lost in a swirl of strategy and computer commands, Mother set into motion the extensions of her very self, a consciousness alive within the castle walls, her very essence being assaulted. The cannons chose their targets and fired, energy beams strafed across the courtyard and catching a few Guild members in the initial volley with the main turrets covering the courtyard.  
  
One young man fell into the open, and into the targeting scanners of the left flanking cannon. It fired relentlessly, and paralyzed by the fear of dying he crouched into a ball and allowed his energy shield to deflect the heavy blows evident through the armor. But under such pressure, his energy field was pushed to its limits and soon expunged from the duress of protecting flesh far too frail, as the Wyvern cannon seized upon the opportunity and opened a hole through his back. A smoldering wound remained where a chest and lungs once rested, and he was toppled coldly, the cannon moving on immediately to other targets.  
  
Mother noticed in a split second the young man's corpse fall, but suppressed what subprocessors and microchips produced an emotional programming in order to fulfill an encoding single-minded, and persistent at all costs. She returned to her battle, her resources almost entirely dedicated to this battle by force, with such an incredible amount of information saturating her systems. As her holographic form stood within the bedlam spilling across the stones, she controlled the cannons on every side of the castle, and the aerial robots playing a rebellious game throughout the clouds, and quickly shunted power and runtime to her defensive systems, shutting down non-essential machinery and support within the castle.  
  
They were well trained indeed, the Guild, the chosen attack force sinking their bullets and energy blasts into steel and stone, and reloading either clips or energy packs by quickly shunting their weapons into the holsters on their belts, and automatically replenishing their ammunition. The pilots were undeniably veterans by the way they reined their helicopters with a touch both delicate and eerily precise, like drivers of chariots handling, nay taming powerful steeds. And with the sturdy shield generators buried within the thick hulls, giving off a crackle of energy, an entity to crawl and glisten across the raven skin, they swept past the Steel Clan and small, golden-painted drones and deflected the laser beams and energy blasts all too easily.  
  
Stone crumbled and exploded, entire towers had chunks ripped from their foundations and sprayed into the air a dangerous rain of limestone, and the battle only a few minutes old greatly took its toll. Black watched from behind his mask the castle degenerate into trailing fires spread across the spacious quad and turrets, and almost smiled in the destruction of a nest breeding sadistic, feral creatures that threatened his species and very way of life, drawing devastation towards them.  
  
And in the midst, an underling approached his leader quickly, a communications liaison between the away team and their secluded home base stumbling into the crook where Black found a temporary refuge to reload. "Sir!!" he screamed, his youthful voice though distorted through the mask's air filters, trembling with apprehension. "We have reports from our outside forces! An entire section of Manhattan is under attack...by some kind of enormous, glowing creatures..."  
  
Black turned to face the younger operative, searching for any deception in eyes behind the frosted slits beneath a molded brow of carbon-plastic, but discovering instead alarm, that to match his voice and heaving chest. "Any resistance?"  
  
"A military contingent has been called in to cordon and evacuate several blocks surrounding the destruction, and a few attack planes have converged on the creatures."  
  
"Send the remainder of Echo squad to help." he ordered, far too calm it seemed when informed of such news, the owner of a cold heart. "The rest of us have a mission to complete."  
  
****************************************  
  
Another explosion rattled the walls, and shook his wings, a tremor rippling through the thick, membranous tissue of his wings tensed and held anxiously above his shoulders. Othello grimaced, his great, crisp hearing drowned and dulled by claps of thunder both natural and artificial. "Our home is being taken apart piece by piece." the stolid warrior grumbled, he like the rest of the clan forced to wait inside lest they reveal the greatest secret Wyvern held. He was tense, evident by his claws unconsciously carving trails across the stone archway he rested against. "Should we not aid Mother?"  
  
"No." came Brooklyn's terse reply, studying the monitor on which displayed the war just outside.  
  
"We cannot just sit here!" argued Shadow, his wings rustling with an anticipatory shudder. "One of this clan has already died! Are you going to ensure the rest of us suffer a similar fate?!"  
  
"No one shows their face unless absolutely necessary." Brooklyn quieted the ninja only barely. "We need to not exist right now, unless they somehow breach Mother's defenses...and I'm well aware about what happened to my sister." He needled his voice, his grief over losing the clever sister kept simmering just beneath his skin, and shared in similar experience with the others, mourning silently. "But to keep the rest of you alive, I'm forced to forget about her death right now and concentrate on keeping us hidden."  
  
Shadow ground his features, his stance and proximity denoting the basis for a challenge. But he instead backed away grudgingly, allowing the chance for Sata to move into position. "Far be it for me to question my leader," her tone trickled with a cynicism unusual for her, another war on a much more intimate front, "but is this quest to now conceal us what you believe is best for our long-term survival, or a temporary mending to a much larger problem?" Her words struck true, perhaps a more painful wound than if it had been a clean cut by her sword. "Or is it perhaps your own fear of failure keeping us from defending our home?"  
  
Brooklyn deflected the casual barb turned warning to redirect his eyes towards the monitor.  
  
The others waited for any outcome, Desdemona pressed against Othello's chest, despondent ever since she had heard the clever sister's sudden demise over the commlink channel shared throughout the clan, but none would come.  
  
Lexington crouched on a corner embankment, a rolling arch sloped from the ceiling supports, his talontips pressed together broodingly, and his electronic eyes shaded by a lowered brow studying between the battle what made equals of the Guild against the Wyvern defenses. "Their weaponry is amazing," he whispered, his attention focused on the energy shields and firearms, "I've never seen shields like those...even Xanatos Enterprises and Nightstone Unlimited don't have anything like that outside of the research stage."  
  
"Which means this Guild has a few connections," Brooklyn mused, a scowl tracing his beak, "or they're being funded by a larger source."  
  
"And what larger force would that be?"  
  
The scowl deepened.  
  
****************************************  
  
Thousands of years ago, they ruled. Whether gods, or fay pretenders alongside the true deities and playing with humanity for their own enjoyment, they were once worshipped, and helped to shape the course of humanity ever since the lower species first walked erect. They shattered continents in their wars, and fashioned the future paths for which those weaker could walk. Now the greatest of humanity's accomplishments were being torn apart by a slim essence of each somehow scavenged and given brief, powerful existence by a madman. Apep and Menhit, Sakmet and Septu, Egyptian myth became all too real as buildings crumbled beneath their near impervious forms and massive size.  
  
Traffic backed up for an entire mile on either side of the street, with the city-dwellers fleeing for their lives through an entanglement of destroyed vehicles and fragments of buildings raining down from the sky. It was chaos on Earth, doomsday, the end of the world as prophesized by the less stable in mind on crude cardboard signs, and all confined to three city blocks being quickly evacuated. A shadow of the dragon king, the great serpent Apep trawled through the abandoned, flaming wrecks, feeding mercilessly on anything that moved. Septu waged a war, using his spear to cleave buildings, to deprive them of fascia both modern and conservative and gain access to their contents. Menhit hunted joyfully, the lioness playing with the structures above as if a jungle, she the vindictive queen. Ejected of their conscious minds by the method of their rebirth, they moved and acted and released upon the city center their one singular purpose purely on instinct.  
  
War, anger, destruction and pestilence, Manhattan descended into sheer hell.  
  
And its salvation at best came, as fighter planes of the U.S. military suddenly emerged from the thick veil of clouds above, circling the recreated gods in order to better see their target, and perhaps dispute their suspicions of the strange orders given. They chose the god alone and furthest from the rest, Set, the strange humanoid thing stalking with a hunched back and an oddly rhythmic, bobbing gait. With their targets confirmed, the airborne trio of metallic hunters descended in between the taller buildings, a daredevil decline between the most precious of obstacles to improve their chances to engage the creature, and let loose several Sidewinder missiles in a plume of smoke having erupted from underneath their wings. But they impacted near futilely on the creature's chest, the sapphire energy void distorting with waves of energy nearly bursting, yet holding obstinately firm. "Damnit! This thing is tough..." one pilot muttered angrily into his communications link. "We need reinforcements!" Broken from his rampage, Set howled in a scream erupting from the pain in his chest, and lunged and swiped at the planes skimming through the spires and dodging buildings at speeds greater than winds irritable and provoked into a wild tempest.  
  
Two were fortunate to escape into the rising, speared warren of Manhattan, another was not. As the others pulled up and fled for their safety and that of the unyielding sterling monoliths that fell into their diverging paths, nearly swiping their wings across the mirrored glass panes, the third fighter plane fell prey to Set's claws scoring through the steel underbelly and completely severing the starboard wing.  
  
"Hull's been compromised!! I'm going down!" The pilot struggled to keep his plane in the air, but the craft instead foundered, and with the damage he suffered his fatal trajectory was undeniably tolling to an occupied city structure. "Mayday!! Mayday!!" he screamed, and without sufficient lift, clipped the side of the building and took with his fatal plunge pieces of steel and glass, spreading into the air a stream of shards and jagged chunks of embellishment made debris ripped from the structure's exterior. Set watched the annoyance deflect back into the street, the damaged fighter plane leaving a flaming trail and gutting the asphalt, feeding a ball of fire erupting and washing against another building.  
  
With his instincts and predatory nature only barely sated, Set moved on, carving his path of destruction.  
  
****************************************  
  
And beneath the false gods' singular, vainglorious notice, hidden into the winding, murky hollows lay one suffered by their forced re-appearance to this plane, if only but a mindless piece of them. Though they had drifted from sight, with only the sounds of their destruction reverberating between the spires, it was enough to spur both sorrow and revenge.  
  
The sobs shook his great form, through her fingertips pressed to his skin she could feel his body shudder with hoarse, gasping breaths, and she could do nothing to alleviate the pain he experienced upon watching what seemed to be the violent death of his sister both cherished and beloved. Elisa draped over her husband in sympathy and exhaustion, crying too, and trying if anything to steady his form, lest he collapse and never again achieve the strength to rise. Mindful not to graze the graceful swell of her hip against the two hideous gashes running down almost the entire length of his back and haphazardly bandaged, she curled ever so gently her arms around his neck, and lay her lips to his sodden, sable tress made darker by the drenching rain. "Goliath," she whispered, feeling his taloned hand clutch upon her forearm, perhaps to remind himself of what indeed he had left, "maybe she survived, maybe she somehow got out of there..."  
  
He glanced upwards to the building's spire almost completely destroyed by the rebirth of Set, now left a smoldering ruin in his wake and sporadically vomiting bursts of electrical fed flame and smoke. A vertical laceration left by the false deity's descent opened up the gutted structure like a fatal wound, with broken, blackened girders dangling outwards from exposed office floors. "...n-no one could have...survived that..." he admitted openly with a voice of granite scraped over steel, his hoped crushed, and maybe beyond any redeeming. "...not even a gargoyle..."  
  
Elisa dragged her fingers across the twin trails drawn from eye to chin, wiping away the tears he had shed, though merged and diluted into the rainwater sheeted across his skin. "I'm so sorry. I know you...loved her..."  
  
Goliath's features contorted, and anger reigned in ebon eyes frosted by liquid crystal, the tears though dried by the torrid heat of rage forcing adrenaline through the bloodstream weakened by tremendous loss, a dangerous symmetry in his wounded state. "...loved her...yes...dearly..." He gritted his teeth against the numbing pain having spread across his entire backside, and the narcosis settling over him and forcing upon him the delirious effects of severe fatigue. But only his sheer will would keep him going now. "...and I will be damned..." his voice grew in strength, from a whisper to a growl evaporating the droplets of rain passed through the stream of breathed fire, "...if I let her sacrifice go to waste..." He staggered to his feet, a shaken journey to rest at a height of over seven feet, though stunted by a hunched, tormented posture. "...we must...stop these so-called gods..."  
  
A veiled brow rose in surprise, beneath the rain-slicked threads of raven adhering to tawny skin. Elisa shook her head, seeing her mate tramp away towards the ruined DeMoro building, his stride tortured, and every step labored to the point of near collapse. She had seen this behavior before from accident victims, he was delusional, and a danger to himself in such a traumatized mental state. "Goliath, you can't!" she called after him, this urge to blindly protect only compelled by hallucination, fatigue and the anesthetizing shock of losing his sister. "You're severely wounded, we're alone and all communications to the castle have been blocked somehow! I'm getting static, the Guild must have..."  
  
"I WILL NOT SURRENDER MYSELF!!!" he screamed, an empty growl bellowed over the raging storms, and perchance enough to reveal his presence in the emptied side street. If he would stop, he would topple, his balance impaired by his wounds and the lack of majestic wing. In his near-deranged condition, to him, if he were to falter in his duty, he would be not the leader he was chosen to be, and thus he staggered on, away from Elisa, and towards where Sobek's gods unleashed their power, blindly. "I am...a protector of this city!" he continued, peering with white eyes under a bruised brow swelling and bloody, and over his shoulder without a wing to impede upon his sight. "...I cannot...I will not give up...I will die first..."  
  
"YOU ARE DYING!!! Or can't you see the trail of blood you're leaving behind?!!" Elisa snarled, doing anything to safeguard the life her husband deemed unworthy to save, her boots slicked in his blackened fluids spilled and diluted with the streams of water washing across the street. "You can't wage war against gods, or whatever the hell these things are, without dying!! Without leaving your family and your children without your presence! You saw them, you saw what they're capable of!! It's too big now! And you're nothing but a germ for them to sneeze out!" Elisa drifted closer, cautiously, with Goliath having stopped with his mate's stirring word's drilling through the impenetrable coda. "New York has better resources to fight this than a pregnant woman with a knife and a gargoyle slowly bleeding to death with a psychotic immortal after him. How much more of yourself can you give before you're dead?" Her eyes pleaded, her posture as well, her hand outstretched towards him signified her desperate want to protect him, from even his own stubbornness. "Please, Goliath, we have to get you somewhere safe...please...before you die."  
  
The gargoyle lurched to a stop when ultimately swayed by his wife's desperate pleas, his breaths strenuous and grunted out in quick, shunted rasps. His shoulders heaved in time with his chest beneath the canvas bandage, and from his wife to the well-lit boulevard just down from the corner his eyes played his choice.  
  
"Please." she echoed the despair clenching her heart. "For your children, your clan...for me. We NEED you."  
  
"...my children..." he whispered, seeing as Elisa caressed a hand over the shirt drenched and tracing the slender curves of her stomach, now lithe, firm, but still to expand with the spark of life. Goliath turned and stared at her, and tenuously, reluctantly, started back towards her. "...our children..."  
  
And though the strident spatter of rain against every surface would distract a sound indistinct and unintended, the alleyway across from them would leak a growl of disgust, a fusion unlike anything ever heard. A faint growl made certain his presence, a predator's bravado allowed unintentionally to filter from the darkness. A scream erupted, a war cry, and a shadow followed the shrill, echoing bay, reminiscent of wolves under a full moon dancing across the forest ceiling. Led by two golden embers flaring in violent rage and streaking the length of the gritty metropolitan corridor, it emerged and charged with deadly intent towards the couple with lightning speed fed by the thrill of the hunt, and the tempting, delicious scent of his adversary's spilled blood.  
  
Goliath turned only to have that shadow completely envelop him, and impact upon his chest with unimaginable force with two arms as if cannons, perhaps even more powerful than his own. Before the chance to grunt in pain or shock or surprise, before the breath was brutally stolen from his lungs in a pained wheeze, and before a stunned Elisa could physically react to the rush of wind bouncing the weighty tress littered about her shoulders, he was lifted from his feet and carried as a conquered prize across the street and into an awaiting brick wall. The wounds he suffered now screamed in searing agony, every nerve damaged by the loss of his wings spreading lucid fire through his back.  
  
Sobek propelled Goliath back first through the wall, using the lavender gargoyle's incredibly resilient structure as a living battering ram, and hoping to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible to the man who had managed to defeat him at every turn. Even as he collapsed the wall of the building, a gaping hole in brick, wood and mortar, Sobek kept his rapid stride constant and relentless, with Goliath entrapped within his arms, ramming the gargoyle through every obstacle and gutting the building in an unbroken path. He burst through the other side with Goliath mewling in pain, Sobek's blood strewn with immortal fay magicks and pumping so furiously as to create a hypnotic, aggressive cadence, a beat irresistible and making the slightly deranged dangerously psychotic. With his maddening journey, he had carried Goliath straight through the brownstone and into a larger, and dangerously crowded street.  
  
Those panicking and taking refuge from their city under attack were now stunned to see a hideously formed creature somehow emerge into their world in a cloud of broken brick and dust. The police officers directing crowd control too halted their task of seeing to the bystanders' safety when the warriors made their private war daringly public, staring as Sobek hauled Goliath towards a van parked directly in front of him. He never slowed, even when piercing Goliath through the vehicle's steel skin, folding the van in two and heaving the metal behemoth from its place. Sobek pulled away from the furrowed, twisted metal, and merely puffed a breath from the exertion. "Thank you for slowing down." he crowed slickly, seeing Goliath fight as tenaciously against unconsciousness as he did the Egyptian. "It made the hunt so much easier."  
  
He noticed the humans having littered the streets and moving to safety from a neighborhood threatened by the supernatural forces he indeed had unleashed, and even a cross of his gaze across their delicate forms pressed them back in fear. He fed upon the terror, he immersed himself in the collective horror they reflected in their wide, glassy eyes like the never before felt breath of sunlight. He licked his bony lips in the choices presented. "Cattle."  
  
"Freeze!!" An urban-bred hero tried his luck against the immortal, as a young cop stepped out beside the van and aimed his weapon. "I don't know what the hell you are, but if you have anything to do with what's going on in this city, you're under arrest!"  
  
"Interesting." Sobek released through the bony facial armor merged into a skull, without even allowing the human an acknowledgement of turning towards him. He slashed quickly at the wetted air, bringing forth a splash of crimson when claws unsheathed into milky flesh, turning tangible skin into pulpy fluid, and serving as a warning to the others having either watched to satiate a perverse curiosity or fled into the cracks of doorways and alleys. The police officer was dead before the pieces of his torn carcass hit the ground. "Millions of years of evolution, and this is the best they have to offer." The other officers opened fire in retribution for their slain colleague, and Sobek merely ingested the bullets tearing into his flesh and torso, mere annoyances with stolen Avalon magic. His blood spilled, and he appeared only as if slightly bothered by the bullets and intrigued by yet another sensation of pain. "How they deem themselves the dominant lifeform is beyond me." He reached in and pulled a dazed Goliath from the folded hulk once a vehicle, and the police ceased firing when the creature held a hostage in their line of fire, though all of them confused by just what this captive was. "As much a mystery as how you can stand to continually impregnate one of their whores."  
  
"...they are...more powerful...than you could imagine..." came the strength on a borrowed tongue, as two lavender hands reached up to grasp Sobek's wrists, the gargoyles leaning against each other. The button pressed, Goliath used his anger and despair to empower a battered body pushing against his enemy. "...this night...shall not be yours just yet..." He crushed Sobek's wrists, pulverizing the bones to render his hands useless, and threw the immortal away using a simple trick of his weight against him. "...it hurts...does it not?..." he teased.  
  
As his fragmented bones quickly glued themselves together, ensuring his hands were made blunt as a weapon for the limited time his body needed to repair the damage, a shadow befell the crouching mutant, and he looked up only to witness his adversary's fitting retribution. Goliath used what dwindling strength he had to thrust a small cherry roadster onto the Egyptian, the metal frame punctured right through by his massive form.  
  
Goliath stepped backwards as Sobek screamed and thrashed wildly, psychotically, to rid himself of the metal folded around him, the gargoyle directing his gaze to the police officers still holding their fire. He silently pointed towards the car, and the exposed fuel tank a target almost calling to them with notched barrels. They nodded, deeming this lavender creature the better of two evils, proven by his allowing them a crucial opening. Precisely aimed bullets warped the air, and if seen in slow motion, trails would form in spiraling eddies targeted against the bulging metal underside where held explosive fuel.  
  
Forced to one knee to conserve himself, Goliath watched a pillar of flame rise from where once lay an antique automobile, the bullets having pierced the gas tank and erupted an explosion reflected against the curtain of mirrored windows. A rush of wind enveloped the gargoyle, saturated with the smell of burning flesh. A blackened figure writhed within the orange ball, lapping flames like an entity vengeful, hungry and consuming all in its path. "Never insult...my wife again."  
  
****************************************  
  
"What did you say about my wife?"  
  
The entrapped gargoyle reiterated, "She is calling you."  
  
Xanatos, so entrusting his care to Owen in the hospital stretcher, had nearly missed the garbled call coming through his suit's intercom. It was Fox, yelling over a worsening static and impeding her voice, transforming a siren song into a near-mangled distortion. "Ah yes."  
  
Infiniti watched from her bindings as the billionaire double-checked the frequency, trying if anything to clear the call. She noticed with intrigue he made no attempt to answer his wife, and instead finished binding a comatose Owen and ensured his weak pulse would remain stable. "Why do you not answer her?" Infiniti mewed, sneering in contempt for a man having duped her and imprisoned her on a trick of good intention. "Ashamed of your deeds?"  
  
He turned and faced against a force of nature he had indeed tamed, and he would be almost proud if this did not set back a redemption carefully calculated. "You presume far too much, guardian." the billionaire seethed coolly. "If in fact I may call you that, you seem a very ineffectual sentinel. Three thousand years imprisonment, and then allowing a lowly human such as I to trap you using the most conventional of means."  
  
This set the cables and conduits that fed her energy to the rest of the building aflame, taxing the technology to its limits with a burst of anger translated into primal fury. "You dare christen my feelings for Owen as trivial?!" she snapped, an animal hiss underlying the warning. She stared at him, her bindings suckling the greatest vengeance she would deliver against him if but allowed. "There is a battle raging above, there is a city under siege by perverted magic, and yet you betray them even as they face destruction."  
  
"Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder." he smoothed out his response, like ice on his tongue and breathing a chilled breath to curl visibly when rolled from thin lips. "I have just instead chosen a different method of protection."  
  
"You would sacrifice hundreds of lives for your own purposes?!" mused spitefully the guardian spirit. "You are as much a monster as the enemy the clan now faces."  
  
Xanatos lunged forwards, menacing in near demonic armor scarlet and ebony. "I didn't release these things into the city!" he growled, his dark eyes flared, the cautiously guarded emotional state he so preserved now breaking, and parading openly an anger unsuited to a frigid exterior. "And where the hell were you when beings like Sobek were set free?! You were supposed to protect us! You were supposed to keep us safe!! You were supposed to keep HER safe..."  
  
Silence fell in the accusation. And in this sterile vault lined with the rarest of treasures and secured from the world in a titanium-alloy womb cradled deep within the Eyrie, no sounds interfered but the low thrumming of the steel ring which imprisoned the guardian, and the heaving, heavy breaths of the combatants. "You are well aware that I cannot interfere directly, or give too much," she revealed sadly, her voice lowered in octave, "and I have many clans around this world to safeguard as well." Her eyes caught a dormant spark, from bottle green to blood crimson her gaze condemned in hellfire the billionaire. "But I am unable to sense Sobek, and the fact I was betrayed and entrapped by you weeks ago made it difficult to warn anyone."  
  
"Never question my commitments or the promises I have made!" Xanatos snarled, edging his form directly beneath the gargoyle suspended four feet above the floor. "As I have done everything in my power to protect the clan and this city, and that debt has been paid in full. But I am far beyond having to baby-sit when I have much more pressing matters to attend to..."  
  
Infiniti knitted a crowned brow regal, sweeping and feminine, and then brushed a breath through fanged, clenched teeth, "Your excuse is lacking of heart, traitor."  
  
Xanatos heatedly stamped a flattened palm to a control panel on the lower half of the ring, and almost instantly, did the power drain on Infiniti's reserves increase exponentially, as did the pain wrought by such merciless extraction. Infiniti winced, and mewled as if a kitten scolded, but gritted her teeth and her resolve. "It hurts, doesn't it?" he challenged a guardian with godlike powers, the upper hand all his and his to exploit. "Having so much of yourself drained away." To see her like this was almost riveting, satisfying in the fact his place as a mere mortal had stepped up a notch when having divinity under his control. "I've just redirected your energies to the external weaponry. I'm sorry I have to extract it from you in such brutal fashion, my dear Infiniti, but at least you can take comfort it is being used for defense of your clan." He left the extraction process to linger and sap the guardian of every last bit of sorcery she could produce, and stepped away, only to hear his intercom crackle to life once more with Fox's desperate pleas. "If you'll excuse me."  
  
He tried to clear the static infecting the once crystal digital frequency, but to no avail, Fox's voice losing a battle against a blaring, erratic white noise gaining strength. "Hmmm, it seems our uninvited guests have somehow found a way to jam the comm frequency." he whispered to none but himself, and he in turned killed the communications channel inexplicably. "Perhaps it's for the best. My apologies, Fox, but it's better you forget about me for a while." An armored fist stroked across the coarse, sable hair of his goatee, concealing a subtle scowl to his own actions. "Be safe, my goddess. Be well."  
  
He approached the Vault doors, towering and impressive, and took one final look towards a faithful majordomo and child of Oberon amusingly turned a friend in days of war and death passed on, but now merely a dangerous impediment to a delicate situation, crucial in its application. "A deal with the devil, my friend." A shudder of sterling, a familiar hydraulic hiss, and the doors unlocked from their sophisticated mechanisms and slid open, and David Xanatos faded into the darkness beyond. "A deal with the devil."  
  
****************************************  
  
"David, where are you?!"  
  
A silence reigned across the intercom, her husband having vanished into thin air at the most inopportune of times. The walls trembled and shook around them, the weaponry sending ripples through even the thickest of barriers lined with heavy gauge steel. "David?!!" Fox nearly screamed into the intercom, forced to search through the castle and building below them for her better half with just her voice with Mother's runtime dedicated wholly to the above outside. "Damnit..." she muttered, resting to the computer desk and running a hand through long strands of silky fire, blinding red as if to burn like its namesake.  
  
"Well, your hubby picked the worst moment to disappear." Nicole muttered, running an inspecting finger across her manicured nails. "Is he going for a dip in his moneybin?"  
  
"Shut up, St. John!" Fox growled, her brow furrowed from the employment of even the slightest of anger, the ache in her head once subtle, now raging. "I am not in the mood!"  
  
The reporter stepped up, placing the children between them both and into a verbal war. "Oh yeah, like I'm really in the mood to die because of these gargoyles!" she snapped, as yet another blast erupted from the Guild forces attacking the castle, as yet another cringe huddled Trinity's wings around her. "Because my search for the truth of what's happening in this city led me to be locked up in a castle under attack!"  
  
"You little self-centered bitch! Don't you care for anyone of the gargoyles fighting for their very lives?!"  
  
"I care for them!!" Nicole pointed to the display screen, where news cameras captured the devastation left by the creatures Sobek released, and where Alexander had stared since entering the chamber, roving hands across skin tingling with a burning sensation for no reason yet apparent. "I care for the hundreds of people probably already dead because of what your little clan attracts like a goddamned magnet!"  
  
Fox's jaw fixed itself into a locked position, as if the fire she so wanted to spew in Nicole's direction was being blocked only by her own gritty determination. "I hate reporters, like cockroaches they scuttle in where they don't belong and do their best to piss off the general public!" Even as her headache increased in intensity, she ignored the pain. "You are a pathetic little woman, and the very reason why our race is the most hated out of every sentient species on the planet!!"  
  
Nicole's brow rose slightly, but not from the barb. "Uh, Fox?"  
  
"What?!" the billionairess nearly screamed back, her body tightly clenched and almost readying for a physical brawl.  
  
"Your nose is bleeding."  
  
Fox dabbed a few fingers to the thick stream of fluid having trickled from her nose without her noticing, for in the heat of the argument, it seemed she had aggravated what plagued her. The blood slicked across her fingers, and she pulled back to inspect just what now curled over her top lip and onto her tongue. A bitter flavor, a metallic aftertaste, and indicative of something far worse and costing than she would imagine. Fox's features drooped, and she lifted wide eyes towards Nicole, the reporter swearing for but an instant, that it was a guise of desperation, and fear. Fox's eyes suddenly rolled up into the back of her head, and in a coiled wave of fire by a tangled tress being thrown into the air as her body crumpled in on itself, she collapsed.  
  
"And now you're unconscious." Nicole whispered, washing her hands across her face and pulling darkened strands of mottled blond from her brow. "Oh this is just perfect."  
  
Alexander immediately approached the side of his mother, her body absolutely still, and the slow but steady rise of a generous chest bound in tight clothing the only suggestion of any life. His expression unlike Trinity's was not of concern, not of dread, but of intrigue, as his hand probed the cold flesh of his unconscious mother perhaps an inch or two from any actual contact. An arc of emerald energy jumped from skin to skin, Alexander's energies searching, wanting for the truth to her illness he knew of long before now. "There's fire in her blood." the child whispered, magic hollowing and making unearthly his young voice, and setting aflame large, emotive eyes. "HE did this."  
  
The lights suddenly dimmed, and Nicole looked around her as systems powered down, and turned off before her eyes, leaving only the most basic of amenities. Power was being shunted to systems desperately needed, as Mother rerouted any and all necessary energy to the defensive weaponry to stave off an invasion. And Nicole noticed clearly, her proximity bracelet had become a dead weight, the blinking light that was her bane now extinguished. She tested the theory by gingerly, discreetly tugging at the confining jewelry away from prying eyes, and with the electronic lock now powerless, she needed only her own strength to unclasp the intruding mechanism. She unsheathed her wrist, her very being, from Mother's all-seeing eye and smiled grandly in her victory.  
  
It crept along the walls, making the seams of ashlar along the walls prominent by the revealing glow of jade. Nicole's small celebration of freedom was short-lived, as Alexander surrounded himself with an aura of magical energy inflamed by his mother's collapse and engulfed the entire room with a radiance almost warm to the touch. The child Xanatos lifted off from the stones and leisurely rotated in mid-air, his eyes roaming past a stunned Nicole and a frightened, though captivated Trinity towards the one monitor left on. He was angry, by the display of immeasurable power obvious, and thinned eyes lost in the power of fay. "I haveta go." the child announced, seeing the gods on screen and experiencing an odd sensation spread through his flesh.  
  
"Hey, wait!" Nicole yelled after him.  
  
"Take care of Trini an' my mom."  
  
A blinding flash followed, like a bolt of lightning contained into a glass belljar, and as Nicole's eyes readjusted to the strain and proceeding darkness, she discovered a wisped plume of smoke rising from scorched stone where the inheritor to billions once stood, or to her witness, floated. Nicole was presented now with a rare chance, and instinct took over when left to her own. She ran to Fox's prone form, and grabbed her by the hand, and being as gentle as possible, dragged the unconsciousness woman towards the scanner imbedded into the wall by the door's side. Placing Fox's hand to the smooth surface, the scanner immediately read the palm and fingerprints and released the door. A sweet smell, that of freedom, carried along the strands of air, and Nicole skipped out into the hall, seeing the elevators far down the main corridor.  
  
But it was a feeling that itched and writhed in the back of her head and made dull her smile when translated into an inducing, whispered voice, and somehow, against her will she found her eyes drawn back towards the computer room, and towards a small winged child sliding from the massive office chair and onto the floor beside the woman charged with her safety. Trinity nudged Fox without success of waking her, and eventually gave up, curling into a ball with her wings jacketing her trembling form.  
  
She looked once more to the elevators so close, and yet so damned far. The voice persuaded the reporter's gut instinct to run for liberation, and she swore under her breath for what she was about to do as her body moved on it's own volition. "Damnit, I can't believe I'm doing this..." she muttered, running back into the room and using the same unorthodox methods to seal the door behind her. She swept Trinity from the floor and slumped into the chair frequented by Goliath, waiting out the sounds of destruction raging all around her. "I really hate having a conscience." she whispered, perhaps to the hybrid pressed against her chest. "It's damaging to the career."  
  
****************************************  
  
The walls even far below the fortress possessed a shiver through them visible to one staring in fear at the barriers painted a barren white and supposed to keep all from harm. Every blast that erupted atop the cornices she could hear, and see the vibrations run through a building more like a fortress, evident by the glass of water rippling, the liquid trembling and perhaps hailing another death with each concentric ring lapping against the sides. Maria Chavez curled deeper into the sterile embrace of clean sheets providing a thin layer of warmth, and past a sullen, anxious Hudson she stared like the rest, Delilah, Iliana, the twins, towards a bloodied gurney centered in the middle of the room.  
  
They tried as best they could to ignore the drama unfolding three floors underneath a warzone, eyes darting and apprehensive to intrude upon a woman dying and a revealed son hovering over her, stunned in his discovered ancestry.  
  
"My...my mother?" Todd echoed Rose's surprising statement, and a dead silence blemished by the dulled sounds of battle now followed the revelation of hidden bloodlines, as Todd swallowed his breath into his chest, and Annika ceased her frantic chore of removing the nun's clothing to stare in shock. Even Dr. Pierce was momentarily bewildered, and a receptive audience skirting the edges of the hospital now drew in closer in sheer curiosity. He but quickly shook off the outlandish pretense when unable to wholly trust a woman so close to death, "Rose, you're delirious."  
  
"...no..." she protested all too quickly, her voice drowning, and rich. "...m-my real name...is...Rose Hawkins...your mother..." Slowly, lethargically, the tears trickled from her eyes, a secret released after so long. She bred a smile even as she hemorrhaged, she gurgled an unfamiliar laughter in releasing a secret held onto for so long, at last able to look upon her son with the proud eyes of a mother. "...your mother..." She was giddy, giggling and crying in chorus in the fact it felt so good to release the burden she kept sealed within her.  
  
Todd pulled back, astonished beyond the capacity for any verbal response. Annika darted wide and anxious, ocean eyes between Rose and her husband, an association between them so deceptively simple, and yet so staggering. "But..." Todd whispered, leaning over her, his voice withering to but a thready wisp. "But my mother died...in the car crash twenty years ago..."  
  
"...that...was me..." she revealed, her voice weakening, her will to survive, forged by a week spent in Sobek's care, now being severely tested by the deadly wound having punctured her midsection. "...we were the...only survivors...your...father...he..." Her words trailed off, engulfed in the blood she coughed up from her lungs and stomach, and Rose started choking on her own life-sustaining fluids. Her chest heaved violently with the need to breathe, and she fought against even her own son for the one consuming instinct to grasp for air.  
  
"Rose?!" Todd screamed in fear, he and Pierce trying to hold her down. "Rose?!!"  
  
Pierce immediately moved into Todd's way, holding her steady with a hand against her neck and chin and forcing almost ruthlessly a transparent tube down her throat. "I have to intubate her, Todd," he answered a question he knew would come from the young man standing behind him, and virtually dressed in a weapon, "or she'll drown in her own blood."  
  
Todd stood restlessly behind him, unable to do a thing to help her. "Will...will she die?"  
  
"Not if I can help it." boasted Pierce, helping Rose to breathe by suckling the fluids from her lungs, and opening a hole in her neck with a scalpel for the breathing apparatus and tubule. Annika's talons stroked gently across her forehead, graceful, consoling motions helping to calm the nun with the foreign devices invading her body. "But since my only nurse took off on me, I need another."  
  
"I'll help." Annika immediately chimed in, though nervous. "At least I'll try..."  
  
"Take her into the surgical bay, Annika," he ordered promptly, his own apprehension salved by his professionalism and duty to heal the wounded. "I'll get scrubbed up. I need to go inside and stitch her guts back together, though I never thought I'd be doing major surgery with explosions all around me...that paycheck can't come soon enough..."  
  
Todd crept up beside his wife, and Rose, though faint and weakened, offered her hand towards him, reaching past Annika to grasp upon a blurring, winged form that she deemed her son. His hand found hers, her blood streaking across the sleek titanium hide, and even through the thick alloy of the Epsilon, the mindlink effectively transferred the sensation of her warm, soft flesh.  
  
"I'll do my best, handsome." Annika whispered into the breadth of her husband's neck, "I promise."  
  
Todd drifted a hand through the wandering strands of gold pouring over Annika's shoulder, and kissed her. "I know, gorgeous." She wheeled the stretcher away, and into the adjoining surgical bay, leaving Todd to stare at the pools of blood having spattered onto the tiles. "I know..." His hand lay heavy with an object he just noticed now, perhaps used to such weight in his palms with the steel suit, and he opened his fist to discover a small silver cross, attached to a chain necklace. He immediately recognized it as Rose's, and now, after so many years of seeing it around her neck, had the chance to examine it more closely. Sterling silver, and as he flipped it over he found a small inscription, stating clearly in carved cursive script My Love Forever, J.H.. "J.H.?" Todd echoed the initials engraved. "Was that...my dad?" His fist unconsciously clenched and he pressed the cross to his lips, brooding, and questioning his entire life, and the expectations of what he had when but a child and imagining his parents thought lost in the fatal car crash. Todd strung the necklace around his neck, letting the cross fall against his chest underneath the armor plating, and steadied his breath.  
  
"Are ye okay, laddie?" asked Hudson, having drawn towards the young human, somewhat intrigued by his response to hidden parentage.  
  
"No," Todd growled back, anger curdling his voice and bringing cold, vengeful fire to a young soul, "I'm not." He clenched the Epsilon's claws, and fluttered his wings formed in angel feather steel, choking on the revelation and the long, lonely years in an orphanage bred simply by deceit. "Someone's gonna die for this..."  
  
****************************************  
  
Thunder and lightning provided a backdrop eerily fitting to chaos erupting out on the battlements, as man versus machine waged an ancient war for dominance. In a turbulent sea of sapphire plasma arcing mischievously from cloud to cloud, the Wyvern weaponry defended the parapets in cannon blaring of sound, and deadly of device, empowered by Infiniti's magic. The Cyber-Biotics drones were picked off one by one, their husks scattered across the stones and falling far below to the streets, though the sheer number appearing from the hangar bay helped to overwhelm the Guild soldiers. Any Steel Clan robot fortunate enough to fly close to the Guild attack helicopters, and even the stodgy cargo carriers, were reduced to pieces fit only for scrap with powerful weaponry slicing through titanium alloys. But with every sacrificed automaton, the energy shields covering these craft lessened.  
  
The cannons traced the Guild members only by movement, their Kevlar suits and shields deflecting the body heat and reducing the infrared sensors to mere useless toys. One Guild member became far too zealous in his barrier and opened himself up, firing with reckless abandon against the mechanical arm of a cannon mere meters away. Mother noticed the shots taken at her weapon, and without an emotion attached to the thought she commanded the massive, double-barreled gun to swivel around and fire upon the soldier. He died like the others littering the field with their corpses when his smaller shield power source expired, and Mother had no choice but to continue in her war, taking lives against the most basic of programming. To conserve. To protect.  
  
If she was capable of weeping for the lost, perhaps she would. If the holographic imaging array and photons recreating her body, making her come alive from just a progeny's lucid memory, would display her burgeoning emotional abilities, they would give to her the gift of tears.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Don't move."  
  
Goliath wavered slightly, when held under the notched barrels of the officers who now trained their weapons on what they regarded as yet another strange creature bringing destruction upon their city. He was in no position to escape when completely surrounded, and since wanting, needing, to conserve his strength, he instead relented and remained motionless as not to startle them into a premature discharge of steel, smoke and fire. "...as...you wish..."  
  
A cultured response cocked more than a few eyebrows, but they held their weapons firm, watching each subtle, tortured movement.  
  
"Lower your weapons!" It was a scream heard from a distance but enough to pierce the thunder's howl and capture the police officers' collective attention. From the wreckage where the beasts had burst from, a woman appeared, Elisa having followed as best she could the rampant destruction somehow forming a trail bleeding into this larger street. She immediately threw herself between the officers and her husband, flashing her badge to ward off the officers far too anxious on their triggers under such taxing circumstance. "Back off, boys." she warned, with defiant eyes and stance, a woman daring against men. "This one isn't the bad guy."  
  
"You know this...thing?" one cop asked in a barely veiled contempt.  
  
"I know enough to treat him as the good guy considering he saved your butts from being eaten." she hissed, having to rein in her tone to keep the appearance of impartiality towards her gargoyle husband.  
  
The younger man could not but help to furrow his brow and swallow the formed lump in his throat in the said fate he could have befallen. "E-Eaten?" he repeated cautiously, as if testing the very word against his fears.  
  
Elisa kneeled beside her lover, inquiring on his condition with but a look frequently practiced between them, knowing to read exactingly the other's expression when so forced. "Are you okay?" He nodded in turn, his eyelids settled over black-rimmed eyes and dangerously drooping from fatigue, Goliath desperately battling against his own exhaustion and the overwhelming desire to sleep from the loss of blood and strained exertion. His delusion had worn off some with the reality of the battle with Sobek, but still remained, the gargoyle drowsy, and slightly hallucinatory, the city backdrop a blur of light and sound. As she peered to the pillar of flames spread outwards with the spilled fuel, Goliath in turn kneaded the sloping precipice of bone jutted from beneath his hairline, a pain erupting not from the injuries sustained in the church, but something deeper, and traveling through his consciousness with a sentient whisper. Elisa noticed the discomfort filtered through onto Goliath's features, a peculiar expression not yet pain, but perhaps an intrusion. "What is it?" she whispered, a question breathed softly and inconspicuously.  
  
Goliath breathed a growl, of hope and assurance. "...help...is coming..."  
  
The flames before them shifted, the shimmering orange and red and gold moving with liberty when the watchers' eyes, that of law enforcement and casual observer, converged below on the form of gargoyle huddled in the middle of the street.  
  
"Help?" Elisa repeated, and Goliath simply nodded, without an answer to just what he sensed. She shook her head to what she thought was another delusion brought on by his injuries, and refocused her goal, to escape her husband from a spotlight much too public for her liking. "We have to get you out of here."  
  
"No." Goliath's eyes widened, when glistened charcoal reflected a fire moving, the firestorm throbbing, pulsing with life and attempting to hold within its belly the consumed. "...I am needed..." he whispered, noticing movement subtle, but a portent of something relentless, devastating, a force unlike any other. "...this battle is...far from over..."  
  
It was a scream of despair and raw anger erupting from the inferno, unbridled by the limiting human conceptions of conscience or humanity, as the flames themselves ambling in a humanoid contour cried out and stole from the tempest above its power. Elisa snapped her eyes upwards from her husband to a dark shape shifting within the gasoline-fed fire, haggard and limp, but almost whole. From the inferno he emerged in languid step, completely on fire, his entire body feeding the flames with flesh continuously regenerating, and his grotesque appearance made worse when entire pieces of his body were missing and charred around the edges. The great rifts of devoured muscle bared openly his internal organs and skeletal structure, and he appeared as a gutted marionette left to stagger on a single string. But the sheer arrogance and psychotic will of a tyrant pushed on a body near to complete collapse. "That was...annoying." he growled, his throat having glued itself back together enough to spew a mangled affront. "Did I tell you how much I hate being burned?"  
  
Goliath snorted a challenge of hot air into the rain-soaked mists, and lifted to an impressive height stunted barely by his aggravation to injuries severe, and fatal to an inferior being. "...I must...keep him occupied...for a while longer..."  
  
"Why?"  
  
He was a blur of motion before Elisa could protest any action, Goliath lunging towards the burning husk of Sobek and ignoring the pain she knew him to be under, his resolve as adamant and unforgiving as his stone form. He met Sobek head on, and delivered crushing blows to the pieces of his body hollowed by the fires, using his dwindling reserves before his opponent could regain his strength. He struck the deep clefts in his form, hoping to shatter and break what force still held this demon together and hold off the amazing regenerative abilities Sobek possessed. For a just a few moments more, he hoped he could tame the demon and play the continuing game by his rules.  
  
Just a few moments more.  
  
The flames died from their ingestion of his tissues by the rain's quenching touch, trails of choking black smoke with the pungent stench of desiccated flesh curling upwards into the skies, and Sobek felt the potency returning through the immense pain, a now shared experience he in fact relished contrastingly to Goliath. In a city under siege, where just blocks away buildings near to them crumbled by the rant of foreign creatures, the humans stared awe-struck from the sidelines as two alien titans wrestled against each other in the middle of the street, one a slab of muscle gleaming wet crimson in the city lights and seemingly held together by a bony, spurred exo-skeleton, the other a more familiar form, but nonetheless strange, and wounded, struggling with each movement pained and tortuous. Sobek gained the proper leverage and drove his fists into Goliath's chest and pushed him away, knowing his balance was indeed impaired and the Egyptian swerved around the clench his talons into a small vehicle lining the street. "Heads up." It became a projectile by his superior strength, launched into the air towards the stunned crowd morbidly mesmerized.  
  
By the purest of instinct, and the great effort a further strain upon himself, he leaped in front of the smaller sedan and thrust it away to protect the remaining group, his balance again having faltered against the weight of the car. His vision was blurring, the bright lights becoming a swirl and the distant screams of terror invading his mind, the delusion of protecting all he could see was stretching his defenses too thin. He was giving too much of himself, even as his entire body radiated with pain unbearable to anyone less than he.  
  
The police still held themselves ready to fire, and perhaps if pushed far enough, would immerse both creatures in a hail of gunfire if only to sate their fears of what was happening all around them, and to secure their city. Elisa surreptitiously edged herself between the police and her husband engaged in a deadly struggle for dominance, but knowing full well he could not last for much longer. She noticed his movements already dulled of their speed slowing even further, with Sobek unallowing of any rest, of any quarter or mercy in his quest.  
  
"Move!! Let us blow this thing away!" a cop screamed.  
  
"No!!" she snarled, trying if anything to hold back officers too easily prepared to render her husband as dead as the eviscerated corpse lying beside them. "You may hit both of them!"  
  
"Considering what's happening in this city, that's not a bad idea!"  
  
"You shoot both of them, you take away our best chance of surviving! Now back off, do your job," she pointed to the stragglers yet to leave towards the blockades nearby, "and get those damned people out of here!"  
  
Sobek backed up against the opposite side of the street, and espied an arsenal of abandoned cars. With the painted sheet metal compressed into his hands and the weight heaved effortlessly, they flew one by one into the air against either Goliath or any human running for their lives as hundreds of tons of steel bounced past them, the wingless gargoyle either dodging or deflecting all he could, forced to run ragged back and forth in order to protect. He in turn grasped the smaller vehicles and tossed them back against the Egyptian in a desperate attempt, but it doused his strength with every car, his shoulders and back screaming in sheer agony, and exhaustion.  
  
"Well played, Goliath!" crowed Sobek, merely slapping away a car thrown by the limping, hurting gargoyle, his body almost completely healed. "You have a will greater than I ever imagined!"  
  
Goliath lurched to a stop, resting, heaving, reduced to a broken man but spurred by a greater sense of purpose to continue. "...for my wife...for my children...I shall fight you to my last breath..."  
  
Sobek's facial plating contorted, as did his voice, "A mongrel brood." Another vehicle sailed into the air, towards any available opening in Goliath's defenses, blunted by fatigue. Goliath yet luckily shirked the projectile, the car scraping across his shoulder, a close call. "The fusion of pure gargoyle blood with that of our very executioners. You may wish to pity your newest spawn, Goliath," a long tongue slithered out from the separation of bone his mouth, and licked across his teeth, "before I remove it from your whore's belly with my bare hand. Then I win."  
  
As he kept his eyes focused on Sobek, Goliath manipulated several talons to his brow, a furtive conversation continuing. "...I cannot keep fighting him...for much longer..." he whispered to the voice projected by sorcery inside of his head, the raw, unpracticed dump of magic serving to cause a slight headache. "...where...are you?..."  
  
****************************************  
  
Several blocks away from the section of Manhattan destroyed rested one of the aforementioned blockades, and one of many forming a perfect ring and cordoning off a two mile square area in the middle of the island containing the gods, stretched across the emptied street and prevented any access into a literal warzone by heavily armed soldiers and an impressive armory of two heavily-entrenched tanks. The men and women guarding this virtually abandoned section were all too anxious, hearing the devastation but unable to see the creatures from the distance, and every second more they were forced to wait merely frayed nerves and made the weaponry they cradled against their chests seem as the only comfort in a relentless, bitter rain.  
  
"Okay people, let's move." They waved through streams of people escaping the carnage and held back others who deemed the danger either worth the sacrifice of saving their belongings or perhaps even thinking this was all just some elaborate publicity stunt, New York always a popular location for such media delirium. But never would these simple soldiers expect the darkened street they guarded to flicker with an emerald glow, startling them into a defensive posture and herding the restless crowd quickly from the road and into the safety of darkness beyond. The buildings surrounding them, standing as silent, wretched creatures when wholly emptied of any presence, were enveloped within a bloom of bottle green, a dazzling sheathe growing steadily stronger as it approached. They turned around to face opposite the sounds of destruction, and found a small spherical ball drifting serenely towards them, skimming across the asphalt and breeding tendrils of animate, twining fire.  
  
"Weapons ready!" shouted the contingent commander, as they prepared themselves for the worst, and being on the outskirts of the danger zone, they knew not what to expect in a city gone mad. The turrets of the tanks slowly rotated, aiming their long barrels towards the orb of magical energy nearing, and making nervous the military force with its leisurely pace.  
  
It seemed so much larger when at a distance, but as it neared it was barely a few meters in diameter and a swirling chartreuse almost blinding to the naked eye, warm and alive and deflecting the downpour from the flaming membrane. They trained their weapons on the ball, passing between them without any compunction of the invented threat it posed and the fear it would sire, and readied to fire lest it attack.  
  
"Hold your fire!" screamed the commander near frantically, slapping down his team's weapons to redirect their aim. "Hold your fire!! There's a goddamned kid inside!!"  
  
Indeed, the form within a maelstrom was small and diminutive and denoting clearly the size of a child. He embraced his womb, and unbeknownst to the watchers created this form of travel and the sheer energy just expunged into the open air as ambient heat with barely a twitch of his eye. Alexander trained his haunted gaze forwards, his focus on one intention alone and as such, completely ignoring the weaponry aimed at him and trailing the path of his journey.  
  
But one soldier would not relent on simply an order given, one would not allow this entity to pass without indeed sating his fears it was not a hostile. "What if it's one of those fucking monsters?!" The most basic of human dread drew his aim towards the child silhouetted within, seemingly unaffected by the energy he controlled, and duty bound him to stop whatever this was at any cost.  
  
"Soldier." He braced his hand to the younger man's weapon. "You want to risk shooting a kid?"  
  
His aim wavered with his choice, the child now across the barriers and continuing on into the restricted area. His eyes closed to his target and he slowly lowered his weapon, allowing the ball of energy to drift from sight.  
  
****************************************  
  
The entire turret took the brunt of the blast, and the structure just barely held against the power of the explosion, dislodging the entire cannon from its tether, leaving a broken hydraulic arm with a charred end, spewing an endless stream of sparks. The Guild were converging, with their reinforcements unloading and replacing the downed and dead faster than Mother could cope with. And with bigger and better weapons, pulse rifles and shrapnel grenades and any other toys they would bring into play, they were beginning to overwhelm and stretch the defenses with so many viable targets, spreading themselves out too far for the Wyvern sentience to fully manage.  
  
From what Mother could determine, they seemed to have one rudimentary but nonetheless effective goal in mind, destroy the external defenses, and breach the castle's secured interior. And they were too close for any sense of comfort. Over fifty men and women had already died at her electronic hands, by gun or automaton, her computer banks able to commit to precise memory each of the deceased, but two hundred and fifty more were spread across the entire courtyard, the grotto, and every level of the castle around to the rear.  
  
And between the rain of fire and energy blasts uprooting stones and cornice structures, Black coordinated the battle. He was a leader, and more importantly a perfect strategist, and he directed the brunt of their heaviest weaponry to converge on a single point, straight through the front doors on the courtyard level. The remaining cannons defending the courtyard were overtaxed, and channeling as much energy as the conduits fed by the main generators, and now fully supplemented by Infiniti's drained magic, would allow. He had watched many die in the fight already, but swayed himself from the pity of their loss. Their mission was all, and they gave their lives to the cause of protecting the whole of humanity.  
  
It was time, he now ventured in thought, to realize their objective. "Gunner!"  
  
****************************************  
  
Another explosion rocked the structure, an ancient, expensive vase saved from obliteration across a remorseless stone floor by nimble talons and an incredibly responsive reflex. Shadow replaced the vase, and turned to Brooklyn. "They are getting bold."  
  
Brooklyn, knowing of the ninja's uneasiness, merely kept his eyes trained on the monitor. "We stay here." It was a distant response, serving to ironically kindle the fires within Shadow's belly with his leader's stubborn resistance to battle.  
  
"I will not wait inside to die!! I'd rather take my chances as did your sister!"  
  
"You'll stay here and like it!!" he snapped. "You chose me as leader, and you'll damned well listen!!"  
  
"Gentlemen?" called Sata softly, noticing a none too subtle change in strategy outside.  
  
Shadow leaned back from Brooklyn's heated statement, piercing his bottom lip outwards and clenching his jaw in order to restrain the animal growl. "Perhaps I was wrong."  
  
"Shadow may have a point," Lexington cut through the argument led by tempers flaring out of control and creatures forced to suppress their most basic instincts, "they're opening holes in Mother's defenses."  
  
"I believe I was an advocate for the original security system." He had joined them in a step swift and quiet, the armor a whisper across the stone with such an audible distraction of a storm and battle just outside.  
  
"Xanatos." Brooklyn immediately turned to the voice he had come to almost loathe in his brief tenure as leader. "Where the hell have you been?!"  
  
As slick as ever, a thinly veiled smile arched Xanatos' mouth in a leader's cold demand. "My apologies. I was just ensuring the security forces throughout the building were secure, and all the loose ends were being tied up."  
  
Brooklyn tramped towards him, pressing his face directly to the billionaire's, so close their breaths would fuse, their eyes becoming a quarrel of stone against steel, charcoal against iron. "Then maybe you can explain why the security shield was disconnected using a code known only to four people," he challenged with a bitter tang to his tone, "including you?"  
  
"I assure you, it must have malfunctioned." he evaded shrewdly. "I warned Goliath not to entrust all of the castle's systems to a singular consciousness. I doubt Mother can cope, especially now. She's already shut down almost all non-essential systems."  
  
"Gentlemen??"  
  
Unimpressed by a tone dripping with ambiguous deceit, Shadow leaned into the armored human, and curled his upper lip to bare gleaming fangs. "You lie well, billionaire. You smell of deception..." His nose wrinkled, an odd scent permeating his acute senses. "...and iron."  
  
Xanatos repressed the urge to shy away from the shinobi's deathly scrutiny, and though standing strong in his convictions and previous actions, he hoped the gargoyle's amazingly precise senses would not hear through the dampening armor his heart beating faster, or detect the light sheen having formed across his tanned, Grecian skin. A falling grin was his reply to the accusation to Shadow's leaning growl.  
  
"GENTLEMEN!!!" the samurai's razor-sharp voice served to swathe through the heavy cloud of testosterone and spittle, and direct the clan's gaze along her pointed finger and towards the monitor. "They've changed tactics."  
  
****************************************  
  
As the others drew the fire away from a computer intelligence distracted if for but a few minutes at most, and with at last an opening presented, Black led a smaller group towards the slab of steel that was the main entrance inside, already slightly concaved and forebodingly scorched by previous blasts taken by several Guild members when having taken the chance. A larger man, freshly unloaded from the last cargo carrier, kneeled and hefted a sleek but substantial rocket launcher onto his broad shoulder, aiming directly for the door hidden behind the security gate of impenetrable steel.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Son of a bitch," Lexington muttered, his wide eyes already wider, the delicate electronics in his bionic implants visible, technology translating clearly the guise of fear, "that's a big gun."  
  
"Mother!" Brooklyn warned the intelligence. "Front gate! Now!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
A cannon rotated towards the front entrance, and fired immediately when the targeting laser had acquisition on the large man. As the pursuing stream appeared on his forehead above the sharpened louver of his mask's brow, it fired as did he, and in seconds his body was swallowed in a hazing of energy eerily exact in aim and pushed back several meters in a lifeless roll. But doomed was the target when falling under the projectile's explosive power. It impacted against the slightly weakened steel security door, which in turn buckled under the immense pressure and burst open, devouring the wall in a beast made of flame and leading a ball of fire into the castle by way of corridor.  
  
The hall funneled the full brunt of kinetic energy towards where the gargoyles had holed up, like a tidal wave unleashed with all the power contained, sending a mist golden brown and thick and searing with the power behind the blast. It enveloped them, toppling the less sturdy and stealing from them the light above to guide their way though a suffocating miasma.  
  
He coughed the gritty powder from his lungs, he thrashed against the forms in his path as if they were enemies. The ninja grew agitated when confined, blind and deafened by the rush of scalding air past his sensitive ears. Shadow hurried to a breathable pocket of air clear of the invasive microscopic debris, steered by the light of his glowing eyes clearing a path for him to follow. "Enough of this..." he hissed, while dashing for the new exit where the churning clouds hailed split-second streams of light. "I will meet death on my feet!"  
  
Brooklyn emerged, coughing spittle into a clenched fist. "Shadow...wait!"  
  
"Let him go." argued Sata, unsheathing her sword, her jade skin dampened in intensity by the dust, transforming the matron in appearance to some threadbare survivor of a war.  
  
"The first impression I want to give of our race sure as hell isn't of a massive killing machine cutting though the Guild ranks."  
  
"The Guild cannot be allowed to infiltrate this castle." she answered hardheartedly.  
  
"We'll expose ourselves..."  
  
"They already know we are here!" she growled towards her mate, cowing the crimson gargoyle with a reality he had been avoiding to protect his clan, and live up to the standards of the position. "They have been watching us all along! And you knew that! It is your own fear and doubt holding you back from you know what we must do! It is time they knew of what they truly faced," with her sword readied for battle, she stalked away, "it is time we stood for our race and avenged the loss of our clansmen. We are gargoyles, it is time we acted as such."  
  
Brooklyn's features crumpled upon seeing his mate disappear into the cloud, then quickly straightened as he instead allowed himself to heed the words of a woman who perhaps knew him better than his own self. The others looked to him expectantly as they would their leader, as they would Goliath. "You heard the lady, people," he announced to the gargoyles shaking themselves from the clearing fog, "let's move. We protect this castle."  
  
****************************************  
  
Shadow picked up speed down the passage, crossing his arms to the holsters bound in leather to his forearms and pulling the tow-linked weapons into a defensive position. At last he was able to test the aroma of battle from the outside, the blood and sweat made ripe by intense heat, the scent of ozone from rain and lightning, it mixed and imbued his restless spirit with the maddening throb of a heart inclined to burst from his chest. He was an instrument now, born and bred for a destiny bloodied and savage.  
  
He was ninja, the greatest of paradox, honorable, and deadly.  
  
Like animals having caught the scent of hunters on their trail, the Guild surrounding the gaping hole froze in their tracks when hearing what they thought to be the storms having gained a conscious voice beyond the mindless growling of thunder, a spine-chilling wail that preceded a shroud of darkness having taken humanoid form. From the thick, ocher cloud of dust left by the explosion he emerged into the fires, hell-bent and ravenous for battle. The one they dubbed the shadow, his eyes beneath a horned brow ablaze in sapphire and a golden blur of unsophisticated weaponry in each taloned hand, took to the air and became as the storms, a blinding fury of motion and primal rage. A few were shocked to actually see the creature in the flesh, and they were dulled in their response to his savage attack, allowing the ninja to land and ferociously sweep away three stunned soldiers with a single strike of his nunchuku. He shrugged off the blasts and bullets of the rest by deed of the adrenaline coursing through his veins, making flesh like black marble and numbing any pain. Blood spattered by his hands, and the shields his adversaries wore completely deflected energy, but not fully the force of impact against their bodies, and thus, his weapons, ancient by today's standards, were almost as lethal and parallel to the Guild's artillery.  
  
Sata, then Brooklyn and the clan followed the crude trail fashioned by Shadow, and spread themselves out into the field as winged sentinels, working in tandem with the remaining cannons to reduce the number of Guild and protect the cavernous opening. The masked humans were overwhelmed at first, when seeing the clan at last revealed in full glory and horror, their duty frighteningly realized and hard-pressed to obey. The Guild seemed infinite, and unending in their number flocking towards the single breach in the castle interior wall, and the arena was complete chaos.  
  
Shadow and Sata were the greatest offensive, better on their own lest they mistake an ally for enemy in a second of blind rage and deadly expertise. Their weapons were the perfect counterpart against the energy shields, if only they could keep their pace to navigate the streams of fired energy and discharged bullets safely. Sata swiped at those who ventured too close, and took out a Guild member that fell into her huntress gaze, the katana sharp enough to penetrate through the near translucent exoderm. Othello, the hunter, unleashed a rarely seen fighting ability, backed by the awesome brute strength of Broadway. Angela and Desdemona weaved around them using their agility as their greatest offense, with Lexington ever watching their flank with his great speed, playing strategist and coordinating with Brooklyn.  
  
And as the last to leave the safety of the castle's interior, a reluctant approach, Xanatos stood at the gaping mouth, his helmet replaced to disguise his features and keep his anonymity intact. He surveyed the damage he knew would cost him, he found his home under siege by his endeavor to protect these creatures who had saved his son's life years ago. He was waiting it seemed, for something, for someone. His eyes were shaded behind the veiled mechanization of his helmet and mask, trailing from the battle as if it bored him, and out to the city beyond. "Come on, you bastard," he whispered, to that something, that someone, "where are you?"  
  
****************************************  
  
As Brooklyn himself engaged the Guild alongside his clan, his dark eyes were searching beyond the soldiers he dispatched, attempting to narrow in on a single man from between the labyrinth of suited humans, between the flaming rubble that was once his home. He wanted him, he wanted the coordinator to this massacre, and amid the scent of blood and discharged gunpowder he hounded the arena with eyes crystal sharp and razor keen. He spotted him suddenly, fortunately, the leader and the one Mother first warned, in the midst of a circle protecting him as they cautiously made their way towards both him and the lesion ripped into the heart of Wyvern. Beyond Sata's fierce and eerily accurate katana thrusts and Othello's swiping claws, Brooklyn fought his way towards him, the lynchpin, hoping to pull him and his influence from the battlefield.  
  
Using his speed and savvy to traverse the rain-soaked field, he broke through the ring they formed around him, and attacked the man head on, his claws wrapping to his arms and holding off the weaponry he brandished. "I've been watching you..." the gargoyle hissed menacingly, without the need to hold any pretense he was a rational, intelligent being against someone who had already condemned him to death.  
  
He struggled against the winged creature's greater strength, the coating of energy preventing the gargoyle from maintaining a sure grip and giving him the power beyond his human frailties. "High praise, beast." came Black's arctic tone through the mask. His fighting skills matched his ability to strategize, subtle, cool, unemotional, and deflective against any grasp Brooklyn made. He was slippery, and strong, owing to the force-field surrounding him and the streams of water pouring from the sky. "I see you finally decided to show yourself."  
  
"Against my better judgment, I assure you."  
  
Black tried if anything to maneuver his guns towards any part of crimson flesh holding to him as if a vice of steel, but could not budge them from their helpless aim towards the sky. He guessed those who once protected him were now busy with the other clan creatures, and thus, leader to leader they fought. "Your concealment wouldn't have mattered anyway," he swaggered, his voice grunted from the exertion Brooklyn pressed against his frame, "I wouldn't have stopped until this entire building was a burning husk and emptied of any bastard creature such as yourself."  
  
Brooklyn's eyes involuntarily flared, as did the growl brought up from his throat, "You expend so much damned effort to kill us, it makes me sick! Why do you want us dead?!"  
  
The mask camouflaged any expression of features, but underneath the molded, composite carbon-plastic, a striking visage aged by past pain and grimaced with disgust. "You're an evolutionary deviation, and you constantly threaten our way of life." he explained, jerking his arms to counter with equal leverage Brooklyn's bouts of strength to disarm him. "Thus, to reclaim our place as dominant species from underneath your foot, you die."  
  
"I've heard it all before." muttered the scarlet gargoyle, unimpressed with such recycled pedantry. "I thought you would at least puke up something new compared to every other would-be xenophobic militia we've come across. And while you're trying your best to kill all of us, Manhattan is under attack!"  
  
Black seemed unaffected by the verve and fire lit from the gargoyle's tongue. "You have a point, beast?"  
  
"You spout protection of your species, and yet your attack prevents any of us from helping!" They danced a dance delicately treacherous, Black's guns almost nearing an aim towards Brooklyn's face, and the gargoyle unable to break the force-field surrounding the human. "Don't you give a damn about the innocent people being killed out there while you try and exterminate us?!"  
  
"Very much. The situation is already being taken care of..."  
  
****************************************  
  
The lightning reflected across the glossy black hides of the attack crafts, menacing shadows supposedly in use for the security of the humans below them, under brutal attack by yet another creature they feared, they hated, they wanted eradicated from their world. Where the U.S. airforce had failed, the entire squadron now resting in burning pieces across the ground, they, in their unlimited conceit, would deem themselves able to succeed. Five helicopters, almost exactingly similar to those attacking Wyvern, struggled against the wind-swept rains pushing against them, their path not an easy one as they navigated through the storm and over the abandoned neighborhoods. They found great rifts and gutted buildings, toppled structures and overturned cars, an ever-widening chasm spread by the massive creatures clearly visible from their altitude.  
  
As he slowly descended, the fresh pilot of the helicopter designated Echo Seven felt his heart lurch within his chest, having skipped a beat upon sighting his targets, supernatural and considerably large. "W-What are they?"  
  
"It's not in our mission profile to ask why or how, son," the veteran gunner answered the young pilot from behind, "just to press the button and make the monsters go away." As the computer achieved target lock and beeped to confirm, and with a touch of his hand to the control panel, he let loose the fury of humanity and their ingenuity to make better weapons to kill in the name of protection. "Let's see if we can do what our so-called military couldn't pull off." Orange fire streaked from the clouds, dazzling and as catching to the eye as lightning, and possessed of a high-pitched squeal as if a lingering mewl of thunder. Leaving behind an umbilical of smoke from beneath the helicopters' armory wings, the missiles sought their prey and sailed towards the winding structure of the snake, Apep, curled within the skeletal remains of a building's ironwork. They impacted across his skin and against the building it curled around, and in a churning of energy disrupted by the missiles, it hissed and shrieked a horrifying wail. With the arsenal's effect quickly shaken off by an almost impenetrable form, it became only angrier.  
  
To feed, to revenge oneself, the most basic of instincts for any creature, and the resurrected sliver of the pretender god Apep followed such single-minded rationale when a glitter above caught his eye and exposed fresh prey that possessed sharp teeth and a bitter, painful sting. The serpent king coiled his body, and pushed the great bulk of energy up into the air, aiming for the fire that had erupted from the skies. His jaws snapped at the lowest helicopter, and in seconds, the energy shield and all the greatest technology in the world proved a futile waste when swallowed into the gaping maw of the snake.  
  
From the perspective of the ingested craft's wingman, it was instantaneous, barely a flash of sapphire and seconds later a few pieces of steel and a severed rotor were left to descend into the city. "Jesus!!" the young pilot screamed, and angled his helicopter away from the creature feasting upon steel and flesh of the downed Guild helicopter.  
  
"Pull around, boy!" yelled the gunner. "Line up for another shot!"  
  
His eyes enlarged underneath the drawn visor to an outlandish tactic promising a death gruesome and unattractive by any means. "What?! Are you crazy?!" he screamed back. "That thing just ATE Echo Five!"  
  
A smirk showing yellowed teeth from a constant nicotine abuse showed through, with an odd fusion of malice and pride. "It's them or us, boy. You joined the Guild to protect humanity from things like these, now's the time to prove you have the danglies to stand up against the monsters you used to be afraid of."  
  
He struggled with issues he thought had been resolved when at last chosen to pilot the Guild attack crafts, having at last cemented his position as a respected member of the touted saviors of humanity, and then suddenly wrenched the control stick, descending, and following the remainder of the Guild aerial force into an attack pattern against the gods. They fired, and littered the neighborhood with explosions and deadly shrapnel, laying waste to an entire section of Manhattan.  
  
The gods under fire then reciprocated, Menhit with her claws, Septu with his spear, and a new war quickly erupted.  
  
****************************************  
  
"It's a simple solution, creature, first we kill you, then we kill them."  
  
Brooklyn ceased the struggle, bringing them both to a standstill in the middle of mayhem. "You're a psychotic, you know that?"  
  
"I prefer protector."  
  
The single word used to describe their genocidal campaign enraged the leader, a contemptible excuse dared to parallel itself against their own proud faith eons old. "You dare call yourself a protector?!!"  
  
"Yes," the shield flared in a shimmer passing across his form, and Black used the sudden surge of strength to push the gargoyle back into awaiting arms, "I do. Agent White?" Shots rang out and clapped the air, and Brooklyn's side bubbled and erupted in torn flesh and sprayed blood. Brooklyn cringed when the bullets tore open his side, a muted growl of pain, and he faltered, back into the arms of several large Guild members. As invisible and inconspicuous as his namesake, agent White emerged from the cloak of inscrutability he often used, a lanky man putting forwards a menacing stance, his shockingly blond hair slicked back, his thin brow arched. Malice personified. His guns were breeding a thin waft of smoke, from barrel to skin, he was the shooter and seemed quite proud of it.  
  
"White..." Brooklyn snarled towards the infamous Guild member, responsible for leading the massacre in the twenty-third precinct. "...bastard..."  
  
Black sighed, and from the slitted vents in his mask secreted a breath into the cold air. "I don't feel the need to explain to demons why they must die. Please kill him," he ordered quickly, "and the rest. I'm going inside to look for any others. It's time to finish this before we lose anyone else."  
  
He nodded to White and a few others, tagging them along with but a look, and ventured through Mother's relentless cannonfire towards the opening, the other gargoyles pulled away by the sheer number they faced and unable to stop the small group of invaders from making their way inside amidst a hail of gunfire.  
  
As Brooklyn clenched against the pain of his side now bleeding profusely, his struggle for freedom against the larger Guild members was a weak, futile effort, his eyes watching as a woman stepped in front and callously aimed her gun towards him.  
  
"Anymore tricks up your sleeve, creature?"  
  
Lightning struck on the tip end of her wicked boast, a flash blanketing the castle in an instant, and what originally thought as an act of nature was instead revealed as a stray beam hitting her point blank in the chest. The woman's shield suddenly crackled with an intruding energy pattern, sending a feedback through the barrier itself and literally boiling her alive as the heat within soared by a factor of ten. She fell, her skin blackened and charred.  
  
Brooklyn recognized the weapon used, and looked above him to see deliverance descending from above on scalloped, cerulean wings. "Yup."  
  
Like a silent cavalry they soared in to help stem any loss of life. Demona swooped in through the battle of Guild helicopter and Wyvern drone, a chancy dash through the streams of gunfire, carrying Macbeth in her arms, the once king continuing to strafe his beam weapons throughout the courtyard. He swiftly rid Brooklyn of those holding him, and gargoyle and human landed directly into the middle of the battle, Demona with a hand-held cannon in one hand and her mace in the other, and Macbeth swathed in the long, dark, duster-styled jacket and Kevlar, showering the cornices with lightning thrown from each hand. The two longest-lived warriors helped to repel the tide without any compunction to their mortality, their fragility. Back to back, they washed their weaponry across the courtyard in a languid, sweeping circle. They fought as if possessed, bringing a thousand years of experience into the protection of the cavernous hole, easily guessing of the desperate strategy. They were the aggressors, unsuited for defense, and using methods honed in the dark ages of knights and Vikings they allowed that particular burden of turning away any more potential invaders to the clan.  
  
"Favor the bold," Brooklyn quoted, his voice strained as he quickly patched a free hand over his wound, "it seems we have a trump card as well." Backing into a corner, he tapped his comm device hooked around his ear and ensured it still functioned. "Hudson," he warned the elder, in charge of the small detachment in the hospital, "they've breached the outer wall, and a small group's gone into the castle. Hopefully, Mother's security doors and weaponry will prevent them from getting too far, but..."  
  
Hudson picked up on the concern, owing to the Guild's success so far. "...We be sure t' be careful, laddie..." a thick Scottish brogue crackled through the commlink, seemingly restless, perhaps even angered he was unable to aid his can in battle. "...Are you sure you dinna need 'r help?..."  
  
"No. You stay and protect the wounded, you're down there for that reason alone." Favoring his bleeding side, Brooklyn left the defense of his home to the others and slipped through into the castle, intent on stopping them. "I'm going to go see if I can head them off before they get that far..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Aye." Hudson sighed, entrapped within this small infirmary, and delegated to guard duty deep within the bowels. He was a warrior, not an object of pity put out to pasture to guard women and children. The old soldier exhaled heavily, a rasped breath, for he was conflicted with the want for battle, and vengeance, but as his aged eyes roamed the room, he found the greatest reason not to become consumed by that primal want he thought left behind in the age of torchlight and brutality. To Delilah, where the clone would often sneak glances to the adjoining laboratory where her child formed in the most delicate stages of life, to Matt, the detective reduced to a living machine comatose, and pale. Iliana, her bandages still visible underneath her civilian dress, she stroked her holstered magnum underneath the thick leather jacket as if to constantly assure it would provide her safety under uncertain conditions. The twins and Nudnik, wincing with every explosion rattling the walls.  
  
And carefully, surreptitiously, his slinked his gaze near Maria, bedridden still, and staring to the ceiling. His great hearing could discern every breath she took, long, drawn out and in perfect, rhythmic succession, and her scent, glorious, sweet, ripe. She happened to fall her cloudy gaze from the ceiling tiles and caught Hudson staring at her. He snapped away, and moved on.  
  
He found Todd standing outside the door to the surgical bay, hermitically sealed against any intrusion, even the slightest tuft of air or microbe. He was watching through the window Dr. Pierce starting the operation on his newly discovered mother, under examination lights many and painfully crisp, with Annika assisting as best she could, both garbed in dark cloaks and surgical masks. He was helpless, and that scared him, angered him.  
  
Annika looked up from Rose's opened torso, sensing Todd's eyes still upon them both. She nodded her assurance and quickly went back to her work, handing Pierce the proper tools and watching his hands skillfully weave together internal organs severed and split by Egyptian steel.  
  
Hudson approached the young man from behind, mindful of the Epsilon armor's heaving wings, Todd's anxiousness translated through the mindlink software. "Th' Guild has breached th' walls, lad." he whispered, as not to raise any fears within the room. "An' some may be on their way down here."  
  
Todd's scowl grew deep, resentful, and even wanting. "Good. Let them come." he warned, his voice not his own. "Let them die..."  
  
****************************************  
  
MacBeth angrily thrust a clenched, gloved fist into another Guild member's face, the blow felt even through the dwindling energy field, and the ancient king slowly gained back the vengeance he craved for the destruction of his home, but more importantly his recently purchased, and never finished book. He was magnificent in battle, as much as Shadow or Sata or Broadway, his style fluid and practiced and evasive of any weapon fired towards him. With roundhouse kicks doubled with his charged weapons, he was deadly from any angle.  
  
Demona clenched to her mace, striking the steel-headed weapon to the Guild's barriers and firing her large rifle into the sea of black. She eventually butted up against another's back, her sister, Desdemona bloodied but alive, her own skills barely keeping her as such.  
  
"How did you know to come?" she called to her flame-haired sister over the commotion of battle and storm, surprised in her presence.  
  
"MacBeth...had an itch." It seemed a jest, but with MacBeth's unique intuition, it was a very plausible excuse. "Besides, with what has been released into the city, it was not hard to presume something may be wrong here as well. For as much as this clan may presume otherwise, they are a focal point for strange occurrences." She turned and used her beam weapon to fend off an attacker towards her sister, allowing her a reprieve from combat in which she was outclassed. Having noticed throughout the battle a certain absence to the field, Demona then took the opportunity to demand of her tawny-colored kin, "Where is my daughter?!"  
  
"She is here...hopefully..."  
  
Demona found grief in her sister's features, as if she knew what would come next, and asked once more, "And our clever sister?"  
  
Her golden hair pulled from it's binding and matted with blood, Desdemona cringed, and answered solemnly, "Dead."  
  
Demona blinked. And swallowed, the pain welled within her stomach as a knot clenching upon her insides. In an instant, with but a simple declaration, she was stolen of the chance to ever make good on a promise made so many times, and echoed in word and heart it haunted her constantly. Her anger interpreted itself as a tortured scream growing from a growl lodged within her breast, the gargoyle firing her cannon deep into the Guild ranks, enjoying each and every strike against the humans who dared to destroy them, and judge their race by conceit and propaganda and baseless phobias. As they came, she fled into their midst, swinging her mace to destroy as much as she possibly could, and doing so, left her sister to watch her descend into her own personal rage.  
  
****************************************  
  
He lifted the vehicle as if it were not even a strain on muscles with the strength of titanium, and chose his target deliberately, uncaring to whomever may trapped between the two gladiators. Sobek hurled the car towards Goliath, the wingless leader scrambling away as the vehicle impacted just feet away from where he was once standing. The fuel tank burst as the car bounced and rolled more like a toy, and spread a wall of fire and burning metal fragments in a concentric ring, and Goliath fought against the blinding pain to avoid being either scalded by lapping flame or pierced by jagged debris. "I am further impressed, Goliath," tempted Sobek, "you continue to fight with such boundless fortitude even after having your wings taken away."  
  
"...as long...as you exist, psychotic..." Goliath responded, his grunt a curling breath spit into the moist air. "...I will...never surrender..."  
  
"Good." A massive, unhitched semi truck was wrenched from its place upon the ground, and poised precariously in the bare hands of Sobek above his head, threatening great destruction with several tons of steel and fuel. "I was expecting you would say something as pedantic as that. All such heroes do." Sobek's entire frame clenched, the muscles bursting with raw power to hurl the semi towards Goliath. "I hope you have the scrotum to back up such empty words." The truck danced in the air, quickly homing in on the wounded gargoyle, and with no time to dodge, Goliath raised his forearms and braced his talons into the asphalt, taking the entire brunt of the vehicle head on. The sheer weight pushed him back into a storefront, demolishing the front-facing plate glass window and brick structure, and burying the battered gargoyle underneath several hundred pounds of dislodged mortar and building materials.  
  
"Goliath!" Elisa screamed out in unbridled instinct, the remaining officers hearing her desperate cry, turning towards the woman with suspecting glares. They aimed towards the mutated gargoyle now that the other combatant was free and clear, but Elisa instantly jumped in front of them, again impeding their target. "Don't!! You could hit the gastank...and take out half the neighborhood."  
  
"It seems I was wrong." Sobek sidestepped the overturned semi truck and waded through the low-lying cloud of dust standing before the half buried behemoth, Goliath using his one free hand to slowly remove rubble from his beaten form. He looked down on him and they linked gazes. "You are an arrogant man, Goliath." he hissed, an ironic statement considering his frequent boasts in every encounter with the Wyvern clan, but psychosis often bred the delusion of modesty. "Perhaps I should deprive you of your arms," he goaded continually, "that would truly make this game more interesting."  
  
****************************************  
  
The energy stream clipped her leg across the thigh, and she stumbled, but remained on her feet with a wide stance and quick movement. Desdemona ignored the pain the red streak across caramel caused, one of many, her tunic reduced to a tattered, drenched sheathe over a form athletic and feminine and questionably abominable towards any man who would somehow not appreciate her awesome, matronly beauty. Hand to hand combat was not her preeminent talent, but her intelligence served her well, her swiftness to elude and use the Guild members themselves as weapons, and lure them into the path of Mother's cannons.  
  
But she was tiring, and Othello knew it. They all were, their battle having raged on for near to an hour. "Stay close to me, my love." His voice was deep, his tone demanding, but she knew him to be everlastingly protecting, and ensuring she would survive this night.  
  
"Freak!" a man yelled, attacking her savagely, butting the end of his gun barrel across her temple when the chance arose. He received in turn received a clenched fist to the face by a spouse angered if anything by the insult more than the blow, the force-field preventing the entire collapse of his skull with such untamed ferocity behind the power of the strike.  
  
Desdemona stumbled into the arms of her mate, Othello turning his back towards the Guild raking their energy beams across her exposed flesh and the membranes of his wings. He grunted in pain, inhaling deeply his own burning skin, but persevered until Desdemona could get back to her feet. "How long can we last?!" she screamed out of frustration, her vision marred by the stream of blood intruding into her eyes.  
  
"As long as possible."  
  
****************************************  
  
As the others suffered numerous wounds and feared for their very lives in this desperate struggle, he instead reveled. Within the scent of blood and the scorched air made wet by rain and hot by lightning, he was truly centered, and infinitely focused. He found himself able to unleash almost everything he had, comfortable with even killing blows, but still controlled that darker side gone unseen since Japan. Even here he was hesitant to use it, to lose that control.  
  
His eyes glowing sapphire, Shadow thrust the palm of his fist into a Guild, his head snapped back in such ferocity to nearly sever the spinal cord. His spurred elbow speared another, and Shadow spun around and cracked the gold-tipped end of his nunchuku up against another Guild member who dared come too close, a killing blow to the man if not the shield protecting him. He struck his nunchuku across a few more, the weapons a never-ending blur, and swept his legs underneath, falling them and moving on to the next wave by using his wings to lift himself over them in a perfect flip, unbidden by gravity's hold. He dodged a spray of bullets with a simple crick of his neck, and evaded like lightning the energy blasts coming his way. He was untouchable, a shadow well named, even with their forces encircling him.  
  
It seemed he had gained a reputation among them, as they surrounded him relentlessly, the greatest warrior and threat to their entire plan. They attempted to suffocate him, to limit his mobility, but instead it only enraged him, and tried his patience. "Get...OFF!!!" he bellowed, sending a few flying across the entire length of the courtyard. Another received a crushing blow to the stomach, throwing up from the force of the impact, his vomit spilling into the inside of his energy shield without any place to exit. He staggered off, frantically powering off the field to breathe through his own regurgitation. Shadow fished three shuriken from his armband and unleashed them against the man's unguarded flesh, impacting in perfect succession against his chest, neck and forehead, killing him instantly, eyes open and seeing the sky fall as did he. The ninja was unaffected by yet another killing blow, one of many tonight, deeming these invaders unworthy of any honorable death.  
  
****************************************  
  
She ducked from the hail of gunfire and bounded from a corner bartizan to come down upon her adversary with fists clenched, and knocked him away. Through the battle, she had heard the screams brimming of retaliation rising up from the crowd. Familiar, frightening, heard only a few times when circumstances were desperate, when she knew her sire would follow her baser instincts. "Mother?!" Angela screamed towards the red-haired demon come into sight, entrenched within the middle of the Guild ranks, crazed and feral, angry beyond any words would allow. Her mother had quickly deteriorated into a rage-fueled engine of vengeance, her sable eyes unbelieved of her ferocity. "Mother?!!"  
  
The voice the only lure from her battle, Demona turned and found through the confusion a face welcoming, calming, and she smiled in the younger gargoyle's distant presence, hoping above all she would still be alive in this madness. "Angela..."  
  
****************************************  
  
In an offering of chance, he found the lavender female distracted, a deadly mistake when not a clansmen around to dutifully watch her back, and he fired when the path was sufficiently opened up between his brethren.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Angela!" Lexington warned from across the courtyard when seeing the shooter aim for her back, his voice but drowned in the wake of another clap of thunder.  
  
****************************************  
  
The bullets hailed an unearthly scream as they filled the air with a lightning flash of shaped copper and a stream of oily smoke curling within the wake, a crossfire of steel which ensnared an innocent in their web drawn across the courtyard. She was graceful in her movements to avoid such a fate until now, and even the best of agility awarded by a form superior to man could not escape an inevitability akin to this. The bullets tore through her back, just below and left of her chest, and pierced her lung and shredded the ventricle, venting a strong, triple-pulsing spray of blood into her body. Angela staggered when the pain at last registered long after the bullets had passed through her and continued on to impact in some distant bulwark. Her breaths became gasping, and metallic with the taste of blood flooding into her lung, and stole from her the strength to stand, the strength to wage a winning battle versus the overpowering embrace of darkness. In front of Broadway's wide, haunted eyes, she collapsed.  
  
Demona watched powerlessly from afar only to see her daughter fall in a congested heap, an eerie similarity to another battle fought once before, but this time, no human detective had been there to come to her aid. Nor had she, to spare her the chance to live beyond a war such as this. The reality took several seconds to register wholly. "Angela?"  
  
"Angela!!" Broadway cried, his voice torn, disposing quickly and brutally of three Guild soldiers in his haste to reach his fallen beloved. "ANGELAAAAA!!!!" His howl having risen to the heavens, Broadway became more of a battering ram through the full ranks of Guild members that came between him and his mate. In the midst of the continuing battle, Broadway rushed to her side and kneeled down by Angela, comatose within a growing slick, reflecting in a seeping crimson the threaded strands of lightning crossing through the sea of cloud. He raised her gently in his lap, pressing a large palm to her flowing wound as her lips moved to form words lost in stolen breaths, the promise of her undying faith kissed upon the sheeting rain, and echoed by her eyes. "Come on, stay with me," he pleaded, as the world fell way around them, the gunfire, the thunder, the animalistic war cries exploding from winged warriors now but a whisper, "come on, love, fight! Fight damnit!!"  
  
The fight he screamed to her was no longer her concern, only the static warmth of death enveloping her mortal, fragile form. She only wished she had the power to tell him by word, by diction, just how much she loved him, but her breath was fluid now, muddy red and suffocating. She hoped he would at least see the devotion she reflected in her eyes, and prayed silently he would live on if only to carry her entire lifetime in his memories. Angela mouthed the words I love you before her eyes closed, her heart stopped, and she died in the cradled pillow of her lover's arms.  
  
"Angie?" he called, refusing to believe she was dead, and stubbornly preventing her demise to register even with the lack of pulse from her chest, and the warmth leaching from her battered frame. "Angela?!!" He sobbed into her chest, and tasted her blood on his lips and tongue, the essence of death itself fused with the pouring rain. She was lost. "I love you..."  
  
"My daughter!!" Demona screamed, rending her bare talons across the exposed neck of a Guild woman when her shield collapsed from the stress of battle, killing her instantly without care of the human life that lay beneath the mask, that which condemned the victim to a larger component, and sacrificed her distinctiveness among a force not unlike the stormfront raging above. She ran to Angela's side, and when seeing firsthand her daughter's fate, she crumpled upon her and wept near uncontrollably.  
  
From a far corner, Xanatos peered from inside of his exosuit to the dead gargoyle, and tried his best to ignore the death of one of the clan he partly betrayed. He had a much larger predicament to concern himself with. "I'm sorry." he whispered, the sorrow lost within the cavern of his helmet.  
  
As Demona huddled over Angela's limp corpse, howling in sheer grief and clutching the younger gargoyle's body in her hands, Broadway staggered back, and benevolent charcoal kindled with the flames of rage upon a final declaration, and a blinding white spewed from underneath a crested brow. Tears flowed, anger simmered and ultimately met its breaking point, and Broadway became more than the sum of body, mind and spirit. Abandoning his dead mate, he rose into the storms, his brawny structure heaving and hunched and bursting with adrenaline provoked by his lover's scent, and he searched through the literal myriad of aroma for the gunman. He found only a sea of black, of masks mocking him in their expressionless features, and Broadway screamed, that which would certainly hinder the spirit of any who faced him. Blinded by red, and mindless, he entered back into the fray, and his strength was more than impressive, it was awe-inspiring. All that he faced were toppled beneath him, as Broadway forged a path through the Guild members with his bare fists, bruising skin and breaking bone even through their Kevlar and energy shields.  
  
They attacked in response. And when they hit him, he was not aware. When they shot him, he did not feel. One Guild member got too close, and when having depleted his ammunition into Broadway's body, the once gentle giant merely snapped his neck through even the shield and pushed the body aside to fall upon the stones glossed with rain, without any compunction for the life he just took with his bare hands. The scent of both Angela's blood and his own compelled his form even with the injuries sustained, and drew long-buried instincts to the surface. That to hunt, that to kill.  
  
He was a warrior true and forged by the purest of blood now, and with one last passing glance towards his dead mate, he swerved away and back into the fight. To hopefully save more of his clan from his lover's fate.  
  
As she wept alone in the middle of chaos, Demona damned herself for not having any ability to reverse the inescapability of death, and cried for the fact it should have been her to fall instead of her offspring. And years of demanding, grueling redemption laughed at her, berated her in the fact this salvation was paid for by the dearest of blood. A gun barrel cocked above her, and she raised blurred, scarlet eyes to a Guild member having stopped to take advantage of the mourning matron. She hissed as an animal would when wounded, perhaps even giving credence to the Guild's conception gargoyles were mere beasts. "Shoot me, human," Demona urged, pleaded, to a younger Guild, his hand visibly shaking when facing against the demon or rumor and hearsay spread amongst the Guild ranks, "if you dare..."  
  
"Sure." he answered rebelliously, and before he even had the time to pull the trigger, a splash of crimson and the swipe of steel would be the last sight he would see as Sata lunged her sword clean and severe through his force-field and chest. He fell, dead, the energetic graviton field coated across his body possessed of an Achilles heel, unable to stop the razor sharp blade from piercing between the electrons of the layers of polarized energy, with the might behind the thrust beyond human range.  
  
The samurai was beaten, bloody, torn but alive and fighting still, and wiped the Guild blood from her blade against her kimono sleeve. She simply nodded a passing of her condolences towards Demona, her thoughts drifting fleetingly to her own children as she leapt back into battle, leaving a mother to grieve once more.  
  
"My beautiful daughter..." she whispered, clenching her talons into the blood-soaked tunic of Angela's dress, warm blood caked on cold, unresponsive flesh. "You were...you were destined to be the best of all of us." She straightened Angela's body, her wings draping the corpse out of respect, and babbling out of a sanity being threatened by the one anchor of deliverance. First her sister, and now her daughter, gone. It was too much, too soon, out of the millennium of watching those mortal wither and die around her, she had not faced any death such as this. "The daughter of a leader, of a princess and guardian...an angel birthed from a demon, you were not meant to die by human wretchedness..."  
  
In a thousand years she had not felt pain as she did now, centered in her breast and aching for release. Her hands though shaking traced her own features mirrored in lavender beauty. She stood up and looked around her, her eyes both wide and frenzied, her hands stained with her daughter's blood. Stained, entrenched, soaked in her daughter's blood, the sheer scent and volume unhinging a stable demeanor among the chaos of war.  
  
Something snapped.  
  
"Demona!" screamed Desdemona, coming to her aid and falling to Angela's side, attempting to give anything to help, but far too futile, far too late to save either of them from a conspired fate. Her tearing eyes shot up towards a stricken Demon, her sister's brow clenched, and her claws dragging down a contorted, anguished expression. "My sister?"  
  
"I...I killed her..."  
  
She shook her head, seeing the self-blame evident and the crumbling of a woman, a singular force, once resistant to any emotional injury. "It was not you!"  
  
"Because of me...they are all dead...my clan, my sister...my daughter..." She shed tears, an acrid taste when curling over her lip. "I...I will not allow it..." she pledged in a growl, her words bubbling on a shaken laugh as she timidly backed away. "I will not allow them to die..."  
  
With her recovered mace firmly in hand, Demona dashed towards the nearest cornice edge, striking fatal blows to any who deemed themselves either brave or foolish enough to cross her wild path. The clouds charged with primal energy incongruously welcomed her, as if allowing passage within their depths in pity, and almost willfully granted her an updraft to soar higher and faster into the swells forced against her. In grief and near insanity she flew through an aerial battle the same way she came, but this time without the grace of caution to protect her mortal form. "I will save them...if not in this universe then another..." Racing betwixt the Steel Clan and drones set against the energy-shielded Guild attack craft, they narrowly missed charring her skin against the play of gunfire crossing through the dark streams of cloud and pouring rain. "My sister, and my daughter will live." she whispered to herself, aiming for Destine Manor. "Even if I have to erase from existence the last one thousand years..."  
  
****************************************  
  
It seemed empty, gutted and destroyed by some fictional war, the street torn up and almost half of the buildings lining the streets completely devastated, as if some great force had ripped them open with its bare hands. And indeed it did.  
  
To save what remained of their homes, their businesses and belongings, a few stragglers had dared take the risk to stay behind even against implicit orders by the military forces called in to evacuate the surrounding neighborhoods. And within a ruined district, some found themselves standing upon the edge of a chasm, their curiosity having led them towards a great crater in front of the DeMoro building left in the assault by unknown to them, a resurrected deity. Assured of their safety with the creatures having destroyed their homes now several blocks away, they inspected the buildings torn apart and the abyss perfectly spherical hollowed into the street several feet deep, nearly having broken through the pavement into the labyrinth of subway tunnels and pipes below.  
  
"I think someone's down there..." an older man muttered, adjusting his glasses to better see through the mud and debris a shape vaguely human.  
  
A younger woman, her clothes soiled and stained and drenched from the rain, chose to think otherwise, having witnessed from her home a massive creature destroy all in its path. "No way," she whispered cynically, shaking her head in pity to the dead, she being lucky to survive, "no one could have survived that."  
  
A hand broke through the chunks of cement collected into the bottom of the pit in a filthy puddle, scaring the observers and forcing them back in thinking the creatures of devastation had returned. The figure rose from the mire collected in the crevasse, the constant deluge from above helping to clean off an eerily glowing skin. She stood, alive, and her flesh reflected broken light from broken lanterns and open buildings, appearing as an entity fashioned from liquid fire.  
  
The clever sister.  
  
The gaping crater had been the result of her collision against the asphalt, a descent from thirty stories and the moment of impact more like an explosion leaving several long wounds ripped across her backside and arms and tearing her clothes from her now golden steel skin. Gashes marred the gleaming beauty of the metallic gold, seeping a strange gilded fluid that was her blood. Of any emotion she could feel from nearly dying in the midst of an eruption of magical energy and a fatal drop from atop a skyscraper, she seemed merely annoyed, wearing a peculiar expression. She held a hand to her eyes to better see her new transformation, and marveled at her wounds slowly closing with a powerful immune system. "Defensive measures," a cold, mechanical voice, promising the threat of reprisal when trailing the path left by Set, "active."  
  
****************************************  
  
They fell before her, the stragglers, those who ran as best they could from a spirit of a goddess raised from beyond human comprehension. Sakmet prowled the rain-slicked city merely a few blocks from the DeMoro building, her feline-featured body now near a human's size to better survey her territory and make certain the intruders would pay their penance. The goddess of plague and pestilence only had to come within several meters before the humans around her grew sick, emaciated, their skin hanging loose from jutting bones and crumpling to the street unable to support their own weight.  
  
Her feral instincts were not the driving force like the others, merely her distaste for humanity would lead her to infect the remaining populace. Any guise she wore in the mythology the ancient Egyptians built around her would serve to mask her true intent. Though her genuine fay self still existed somewhere else in this world, this remnant, a shard broken from the past, was just as deadly. As she sauntered alluringly down the urban path paved with fallen corpses and streaming with water, her catlike eyes narrowed to focus her gaze down the street, towards where an energy surge rippled fiercely the worldly energies of sorcery and magic spread across every tangible structure and earthen mount. The gods and fay and even some supernaturally-inclined humans and gargoyles had access to this globe-spanning haze, or field, and it made a presence known to Sakmet like a gentle tug on a spider's web. A green ball floated into view from the street running perpendicular, and slowed, having noticed the so-called god sculpted of sapphire energy.  
  
Alexander stalled his journey and studied at the catwoman far from him. He frowned like any child would when sensing the sheer malevolence by mere stance and body language, and even the perfect replica of the true Sakmet's untamed grin.  
  
Though unpossessed of any intelligent mind, she knew great power beheld this human child, her fur bristling upon her back and prehensile tail. "...boy..." she struggled to speak, to go beyond her limitations of the magical orbs which gave birth to her. Her energies focused, and the disease and plague she carried swept towards the hybrid.  
  
He held firm. "You're not real." Alexander seethed, raising a single hand with fingers splayed. "You're a stupid fake." The street shook, the buildings quivered, and Alexander increased the sum of the energy within him into the one extremity aimed for the malicious feline slowly building what powers lay within her temporary form. From his flesh came the emerald fire passed down through an astonishing ancestry, what had been building since but a child and faintly tempered through tedious lessons with the trickster. The entire street was engulfed in a single beam of energy, shot from Alexander's hand towards the stunned Sakmet and pulling any loose debris into the beam with a sudden vacuum. Her reaction was but a scream, as her physical presence was scraped away by the blast channeled down the entire street, energy diluted with energy and tearing into oblivion synthetic, energy-made flesh. She completely dissipated, only a lingering howl left to bleed into the heavens.  
  
The blast left a trail of fire and seared asphalt down the entire street, its end point a building hollowed by the blast. Alexander's hand shook and eventually fell to his side, the young boy surprised at his own strength, as he did not mean to unleash such power. But satisfied, he moved on, towards the one who needed him the most.  
  
****************************************  
  
Impatient, Sobek decided to aid the gargoyle from his tomb and reached in, gripping his bony claws around Goliath's neck and wrenching him from the brick wall laying atop him as if a broken blanket. His greater strength held Goliath aloft if but a toy compared to his mutated stature, and he eyed carefully the gargoyle clutching his hands to Sobek's single claw stealing the sweet taste of fresh oxygen. "I am so disappointed." he seethed, his anger radiating clearly. "We are the predators living among prey counting in the billions and steadily rising, and you choose to dawdle amongst mere livestock. We are the inheritors of this planet, we evolved first, and so shall we prevail against the infestation of humanity."  
  
"...and...I thought...I was...hallucinatory..." Goliath spit out with great effort, bidding his time, and placing his very life in danger if only to hold out for a few minutes more.  
  
"You wish to live among them, to love them, to exchange bodily fluids with them, to continually protect them even when they want you dead." Sobek's talons drew blood from a muscular neck. "No matter how much you plead to them or pledge your undying guard, they will betray you. You are the delusional one here, Goliath, not me."  
  
"...you...will not...succeed..."  
  
"When I ascend to a throne made of the skin of six billion human corpses, we shall see."  
  
Nearly choking on his own tongue, Goliath managed to slip on a whisper of forced air his rebuttal. "...you believe...yourself king...but you are nothing...you are the...collective excrement...of those six billion humans..." He released a muffled laughter, unheard by anyone but himself. "...to be flushed with the rest of their shit..."  
  
In a fit of anger, Sobek's hand clenched and nearly broke Goliath's neck, the gargoyle's stratagem working all too perfectly. "How dare you!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
"Where is it?!! WHERE IS IT?!!!" Demona threw the ancient apothecary table across the length of her basement sanctum, having just arrived the gargoyle desperately foraged through the bowels of her mansion home searching for the medallion forged by technology and magic and great effort on her part. The tears skidded from the edges of her eyes, making dark indigo of mottled cerulean, and blurring her sight. Angela's blood still clung to her in crevices where the rain could not wash it completely away, caked and dried onto her skin and a bitter, pungent remembrance.  
  
She raked her hands across the shelves of her bookcase, emptying the contents onto the floor in her mad quest. Papers and sculptures, glass orbs and jars spilling and shattering and releasing their contents, all was upturned mercilessly. Her hands shook violently, her chest heaved with wracking sobs, she destroyed an immaculately kept space in a matter of seconds only to discover a room of useless trinkets and spells making themselves a pile across the ground. "Where?" she roared, losing sentience to rabid instinct. "Where?!!"  
  
She spun around, and found on the wall behind a painting left crooked the corner edge of a hidden safe. "...the vault..." She tore the painting from its place, an original oil from the 17th century now reduced to tattered scraps when set against her claws, and plunged a hand through the hard steel of the embedded safe. The door was ripped away, and inside the murky concave, a hinged, ornamented box stared back at her. Hungry to have its power resting in her hands, Demona flouted the bother of a key and instead used her adrenaline-induced strength to tear it in half.  
  
The medallion fell and cluttered to the floor, crimson rimmed with gold, and she lay pause to her desperate pursuit to claim it. It would be the ultimate betrayal to try and unravel everything that has come before, to try and best the river of time and change the flow of history thought immutable. She had her own theories of time and its intricate functions, given credence by Brooklyn and Sata's timedancing journeys, of how their experienced future was already different, and near proven with Griff's deliverance into the future, saved from a fated death, and the visitation into this timeline by figures not yet born. So many loopholes to exploit, and she would eradicate all of space-time to bring back those she loved and ultimately betrayed.  
  
Demona suddenly clutched to the medallion ridden with delicate circuitries, and ran from the room, her decision made under manic conditions without taking enough time to heed the devastating consequences. "Voice ident: Destine, activate Valkyrie," she called out, coldly, her own security system hailing its master's voice within this gothic mansion, "recognize new programming..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Let's go, soldier. We're losing precious time."  
  
"We're almost through, sir." commented the driller, using a device that sucked every last ounce of ambient warmth from the surrounding air to supplement the raw heat it produced to melt through even the thickest, most resilient of steel. The security door closed between two connecting stone corridors, centered about five feet above the floor, transformed into a warm luminance of ruby orange spread from a single point within the wall of dulled, riveted sterling.  
  
Black waited impatiently for his subservient to open a hold through the gate, the small Guild contingent already having dealt with the interior weaponry, smaller cannons similar to what lay siege to their forces outside reduced to melted metallic stumps hanging limply from the corridor walls. Through three security doors already, this was the last to fall before the large energy source they had detected and followed relentlessly. "You're sure about your readings?" he asked another.  
  
His eyes were red, and searching. "We're getting a tremendous power reading from down that corridor, sir." he answered his leader, using an infrared visual scanner integrated into the eye slits of his mask to look through the walls and flooring. "It's regulating the power brought into the entire castle."  
  
"A control room." Black mused, hoping to come across such a discovery as this.  
  
"Yes, sir, but because of the heat generated within the entire chamber, I can't tell if there are any bogies inside." His gaze trailed downwards, as if he was looking through the entire castle, and indeed, with the inventive technology at his command, he was. "The rest of the castle is empty, but I have body heat signatures from several floors below us. In the Eyrie building."  
  
Black nodded. "You three, head to the room on this floor, kill any resistance, and if you can find their computer banks, download everything they have and then destroy it. Weapons systems, computers, everything..." He turned around the agent White and chose the last four from the group to accompany him with prompt and practiced hand signals. "White, we'll head to the elevator shafts. We're going down."  
  
****************************************  
  
His hand clenched, the pressure against Goliath's larynx incredible, choking the gargoyle. Sobek leaned into him with eyes steeled and devoid of mercy, the sound of gurgling echoing through his adversary's throat and gaping jaw sheer pleasure. "How dare you think you could stand up to me!" he blew a breath noxious across Goliath's senses, angered by the gargoyle's defiance and raw impertinence. "You, the man who would condemn our race to dilution, who would sire a race of mongrels! How dare you believe you were my equal! How dare...you..." he trailed off, intrigued by something new, "why are you laughing?"  
  
Goliath's mouth, cut and bleeding, had somehow swelled into a smile, and in his fatigued state he laughed, healthy and rich even with a compressed throat, and unnerving to the Egyptian, never having heard such a sound erupting through Goliath's chest. "...I...am stalling..."  
  
"Stalling?" The immortal cricked his neck to the side, captivated by a new level to the game. He tightened his grip on Goliath's neck, and hoisted him higher. "Now you have my attention. What are you waiting for? It can't be your clan, they are under attack as we speak." Goliath's eyes flashed with the mention of his clan and Sobek's knowledge of their situation. "And I believe your newly resurrected sister was recently incinerated. So why, pray tell, are you stalling?"  
  
Goliath was suddenly released from Sobek's grasp when the immortal was lost within an energy beam, centered directly at his chest, and knocked away. A stroke of luck and good timing, and Elisa took the chance to run towards her husband, as a ball of blinding bottle green fell to the ground and dissolved, releasing of all things a child from its nexus.  
  
He scampered towards the gargoyle trying to hoist himself onto his feet by Elisa's aid, and stood before them both, rubbing his chest, as if in pain. A child having bested an immortal not unlike a force of nature, and he seemed strangely unfazed. "Are you okay?"  
  
"...I am...now, Alexander...thanks to you..." Goliath managed a reply. "I was...waiting for you...your powers are evolving quicker than...any of us thought possible..."  
  
"He hurt my mom." The youth looked back hesitantly towards where Sobek shook off the effects of the blast, for some apparent reason placid in comparison to what had annihilated the Sakmet entity. "But I can't fight 'im..." Alexander explained with wide eyes, awed by the massive seven and a half foot gargoyle even with his haggard appearance. "Not by myself." An idea arose, popping into his mind, and the fact such a stunt would have no tutors to protest gave precedence. "I need t' use your body, G'liath."  
  
"What?" Elisa deadpanned.  
  
Mimicking his wife's stunned statement in expression, the gargoyle quirked his brow in a questioning response, but simply nodded when beyond the capacity to heed the reason behind Alexander's odd request.  
  
"Wait," Elisa cut through, "what is he going to do? Goliath?" Fear was prevalent within her voice, Goliath having lasted longer than she ever thought, but no one, not even the world's greatest warrior could survive the bloodloss and constant battle. "Goliath?!"  
  
"..find...somewhere safe, my Elisa..." Goliath squeezed his wife's hand and gently nudged her away, and simply watched as Alexander walked around him, reached out and timidly pressed his tiny hand to his backside. It was a warmth soothing, addictive, a tingling across every neuron of his body similar to the afterglow of climax with his wife, as Alexander's hand pressed into the thick hide, and continued on inside of his flesh, buried up to the elbow.  
  
Sobek rose from the street and puffed a chest with the bony plating scorched and steaming. "The boy." he growled perceptively, stomping his ways towards Goliath. "This was unexpected. Why do I continually drag these things on?"  
  
The scent of brimstone and fire suddenly filled the air, raw, unfiltered sorcery, of flesh merging from two into one. Alexander reached deep inside Goliath, his warm tawny tint diluting into lavender as his magic fused them into a single being, not entirely human and not entirely gargoyle. Before Elisa's astonished gaze, the child wholly disappeared into the mighty form of Goliath, enveloping them both within the aura of his abilities stretched to their limits to encompass such a feat. This was new territory for the hybrid fay, and he stepped cautiously when entering Goliath's body and consciousness, not wanting to disturb the great labyrinth of emotion, sensation and sentience delicately strung together. Goliath shuddered and strained from the foreign cognizance, and babbled with two distinct minds vying for a single body, "...horseys...Trinity...father betrayer...mother sick...sky deprived...Elisa...baby..." It was an endless string, as two consciousnesses merged, creating anew from the vast sentient wastes provided.  
  
Alexander found comfort though within this powerhouse, feeling the sheer strength flowing through a body crafted through evolution's finest, and the bonds of love for his mate, his family and clan. He reshaped the battered host to suit his needs, their needs, its needs. Where once the bloodied gashes torn down the leader's back served as a grim reminder, now seeped emerald magicks exact to those bulging his arteries and making wild his triple heartbeat. From a glistening green grew new struts made entirely of energy, shredding the canvas bandage and yawning wondrously into wings mirrored to Goliath's own, severed and buried more than a block away under the ruins of a fallen cathedral. Wounds were mended, salved and healed. For now, through the power of a child, he was whole.  
  
Sable hair turned to scarlet, the strands coated from root to tip in the fires of a fairy lineage and perhaps just a cosmetic touch. The created entity shook its wings, a light dusting of energy shaken from the testing of the new jade appendages almost translucent, but wide and emerald and magnificent nonetheless. His feet lifted from the ground in a moment of levitation, magical wings awarding a flight serene and steady without exertion, and turned towards the indignant Egyptian. The creature born of two swept away any intruding brick and steel beams in its path, and effortlessly moved the broken semi truck from his path with a single arm, his eyes burning. "Sobek." It was an amalgamation of a throaty rumble and a gentle soprano making this otherworldly tone. The combination of two completely separate beings, Goliath and Alexander, in both body and mind and consciousness, melded in voice as well. It was a warning the Egyptian heeded quickly as the flames of emerald sorcery licked at his skin, not hot but possessed of an energy he flinched from readily. The child allowed the leader to play the dominant role, but fueled the fires of rage with his own personal vendetta against the immortal. "You hurt our mother." the two voices cautioned gravely, speaking in a sense plural, of two beings. "You hurt our mate, our city, our home. You are a blight on this world. The game...shall continue."  
  
****************************************  
  
The assaulted shields at last gave way and left the helicopter vulnerable to attack. Septu, his energy created form mottled with great rifts left from the barrage of missiles slowly healing themselves, glanced back up towards the Guild craft. He unleashed his spear and cleaved the craft in two, igniting the fuel reserves and hydraulic fluid, engulfing the helicopter and its crew in a burst of light and smoke. The remains fell to the ground under Septu's foot, the forth helicopter to go down in the Guild's attempt to stop these gods. One more remained, a desperate bid to battle and stay alive.  
  
Menhit leapt at one from a taller building and narrowly missed engaging her claws against the energy field surrounding the craft. The young pilot of Echo Seven swerved off. "Damnit, we need back-up!!" he screamed, his sensibilities still unable to grasp such an occurrence from ever happening, his pledge to safeguard humanity through the Guild pushed to the limits of an established reality.  
  
"Pull in, boy!" yelled the gunner. "Another shot! All we need is another shot!!"  
  
"We're getting slaughtered, we need to get out of here and get help!!"  
  
"One more shot!!"  
  
He struggled to keep the helicopter steady in the winds pushing against the craft, and from the corner of his eye, found the sapphire lioness leap to a taller skyscraper and size up her prey. He tried to pull up, but Menhit was too fast. "God save me..." Her claws ripped through the cockpit, obliterating the last line of defense.  
  
****************************************  
  
The helicopter dodged only just the strange humanoid object as it dared to intrude upon the aerial battle above and around Wyvern, attaining a speed blurring and unstoppable and its path straight and uncaring of the behemoths claiming its airspace as their own. It was similar to the Steel Clan robots, but lithe, feminine, a machine molded from the midnight form of the reclusive Nightstone Unlimited CEO.  
  
A Valkyrie, programmed in a moment of madness and despair, curled its arms around a solitary passenger who cared less what weaponry erupted around her. Through the air and skimming the stones, the Valkyrie blazed a suicidal trail through the Guild and towards the opening guarded by the gargoyles, programmed for one such reckless task that would cost it its very existence. The wings curled in around the cargo and the automaton broke through the line, scraping steel skin across stone when it crashed through the hole into the castle interior.  
  
Demona crawled from the wreckage of her robot, dazed but alive, having used the one personal model stationed at her home as chauffer to traverse the distance between the Eyrie and Destine Manor in a matter of minutes. Now safely inside, she traveled the corridors with a single intent alone, to salve the wound of betrayal. The halls were a blur, her memories rich of this palace still and she navigated with great skill, until coming around a corner and skidding across a slick having polished the stone floor in blackened scarlet. Blood. And by the scent, of heavy iron and protein, it was gargoyle. Demona regained her footing and followed the trail towards the being that had spilled it.  
  
Brooklyn huddled against the wall, his hand against his side in a fruitless struggle to keep inside of him his own blood, pouring from the wound suffered outside. An injury far worse than originally thought had taken its toll, and the new leader of Wyvern resisted the claim of unconsciousness.  
  
Demona slowed her passage and peered down to him, a strange fusion of emotions played across her features.  
  
Brooklyn thought his eyes played the cruelest of tricks in his injure, when he raised his eyes upwards to see Demona clenching to a medallion though slightly differing in color, it was that which condemned him to forty years of nomadic torment. It was a plot too simple to deduce, but he wondered what would drive this woman to try such a stunt. "Demona...don't..." he pleaded, grasping towards the gate. "You can't change the past...you'll only cause chaos within the timestream. Is stopping this battle worth it?"  
  
She flinched and backed away a step, clutching the gate to her chest as if to lose it would deny her everything. "I will shatter all of eternity, if only to give just a single universe, a single timeline, back the beauty that is my daughter."  
  
"Angela?" His eyes widened. "She's...?"  
  
"Dead."  
  
Brooklyn forced down the lump in his throat, weighing a possible chance for success against forty years of memory. "You're delusional, Demona...y-you're not thinking clearly."  
  
"I am thinking clearly for the first time in a long time, Brooklyn. One decision on my part bled a million strands of possibility throughout an infinite number of realities. And there is one defining factor in the equation to be eliminated in order to set things right." She leaned in, her eyes slick, determined, deranged. "Me."  
  
His brow knitted to her obscura, but the one clear truth of her plan screamed to him. "I'll stop you..." he assured.  
  
"I think not." Demona swiftly kicked him across the face, knocking him out cold, his body slumping to the ground. "You have done enough this night. And I will not allow my daughter to pass into oblivion because of my deeds." Her journey resumed.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Hurry up, man!" he yelled towards his smaller, suited comrade, the technician, his hands delving through the labyrinth of wiring behind the handprint scanner of the main computer room. The others had tried their weapons to gain access, their technology, but to no avail, this door particularly resilient to any such damage they could inflict compared to the rest relatively unproblematic. He stood anxiously behind the tinkerer, he and the other guard exposed in the hall, far too much for their liking. "Come on, come on!!"  
  
"I'm going as fast as I can!" he snapped back, unawares of the blur of motion behind him, and a struggle for two men and their lives in the space between seconds. "I think I got it." he announced, just before a muffled snarl brushed the air behind him, in perfect sync with the gale of wind teased against his neck. The tiny hairs bristled, and a spatter of blood sprayed across the door he kneeled in front of, ending the motion he had sensed. His breath held, he whispered, "Harrison?"  
  
"Harrison is dead."  
  
The betraying shadow behind him spread its wings, cloaking him within the darkness of membranous leather, a breath blown hot across his flesh. On instinct, he powered the force-field, disengaged to allow for the fine touch with his fingertips inside the wiring harness of the door panel. He turned around only to have a clawed hand scrape across his face, fortunately protected by a coating of energy lest it cleanly remove the skin. "Shit!" he screamed in fear, Demona unsuccessful in her first attempt to kill him as she did the others. "You can't hurt me, demon!" he goaded, edged up against the door with this strange, ugly, erotic creature studying him with great intrigue. "I'm safe from your claws."  
  
"Perhaps." Demona grabbed his neck, and slammed his head against the stone arch housing the door, repeatedly. Time after time, blow after blow, she pulverized the stone with the Guild member's head, the shield holding barely but acting two-fold, the impact jarring considerably against the man's skull. Even as blood poured from his nose, she continued, merciless, unfeeling, until, sated only just, she released his body to slump onto the floor, the blood seeping through his broken skull and matted hair and pooling within the shield. "I hate humans."  
  
She turned her attentions to the door, a barrier strong, and enough to keep even the Guild and their technology outside. The trail of human stink led her senses to believe there were occupants inside, and she pounded upon the door battered by previous attempts to dislodge it. It opened, Demona's presence verified with the camera above, and the gargoyle found herself directly face to face with Nicole.  
  
"Oh thank god you're here..." she breathed a sigh of relief, entrapped within for hours, Nicole perhaps unawares of the incredible irony of finding salvation and assistance in the species she endeavored to expose.  
  
Demona silently gripped a hand to Nicole's face and pushed her aside. "Move, human." she snarled, ridding herself of the obstruction in her path to what she sought, the reporter bounced off the computer desk and onto the floor. Stepping over Fox's prone form, unconscious still, Demona charged towards the main power feeds, feeding a grin in her ventured prize. She grabbed a cable snaked through the roof, and ripped it free from it's moorings. Without care for her safety, she tore the end from it's coupling, and bred a fire of electrical seepage breathing sparks across the ground, and angled the medallion from her loincloth belt.  
  
The mythical creature gleamed in gold, ancient sorcery melded with advanced science, and Demona held her prize gingerly, her reflection mirrored in the surface of crimson. "For you, daughter." It craved power, and the charge port on the back found the energy needed to rouse this monstrosity to life, fed directly from the main generators, and, unwittingly, from the guardian spirit herself. Her energies directed outside, Infiniti's granted magic now escaped into a vessel forged from incompatible sorcery. The blood of Gaia and Avalon and human merged conflictingly as would oil and water, churning and becoming a storm within an unassuming medallion.   
  
****************************************  
  
The drain increased, and she grimaced, contorting majestic features. Even the most powerful gargoyle on the planet now bared immeasurable pain as her cells screamed in agony having so much torn away from her by the invasive technology. Infiniti bit her lip to prevent from leaking a scream, as the demands on her massive power reserves turned suddenly fierce, and the herringbone seams crossing their way through the steel ring holding her flared a bright sapphire with magical energy.  
  
She was feeding the fluids of sorcery to another source in pure chaos, her energies directed at such an incredible rate as to make bulge her arteries above velvety cream skin and widen her eyes to the steel lined ceiling above. "There is...something wrong..." she gasped, her emerald, spitfire eyes becoming bloodshot. "There is...a disturbance..."  
  
Infiniti screamed.  
  
****************************************  
  
"...enough death, enough destruction..." Demona whispered, watching as the Phoenix gate shed its dulled coloring for a brilliant glow, successfully powering the fusion batteries. "An entire millennium spurred from one single mistake shall be swept away."  
  
"Auntie 'Mona?"  
  
Demona turned to see Trinity approaching with due caution, from the corner of the room, of anything, this child a most bitter reminder of what lay dead on the stones outside. The hybrid sought comfort in the arms of a caretaker, unable to see beyond a trembling sheathe of azure skin her rage and despair having fused and swirling into a tumult. "Get away from me, child!!" she instead roared, scaring the child back into the arms of a recuperating Nicole. "I do not have any compunction to comfort a mewling babe of a woman at times I cannot readily stand!"  
  
With Trinity cowed, and huddled into the shoulders of a stunned Nicole, Demona seemed as if to regret words spoken with wild abandon and unthinking of the consequence to a child thinking the world of her, but she was far too lost in her own guilt to care.  
  
"Kiss your mother with that mouth?" Nicole hissed, unimpressed with any child, no matter what species, being treated in this manner.  
  
"I killed my mother." Demona retorted, watching with dimmed eyes the gate vibrate, soaking in foreign energy like a sponge within any signs of slowing or reaching a breaking point. "I killed all of them, young and old alike, because of one small, simple choice I made, I created all of this," Demona waved her hands around to show off a creation deemed entirely hers, the sounds of destruction a grievous melody played far too long, "and condemned the survivors to a slow death." Demona peered over her shoulder, blue skin rimmed red in anger and malice. "And the only reason I have not killed YOU, human, is the fact it seems you are the only one left to care for the child in your arms at the moment. Consider yourself fortunate."  
  
Nicole suddenly clenched tighter to Trinity's frame in the threat she knew to be real.  
  
The gate chimed inconspicuously, tearing Demona's gaze away from the reporter and onto her weapon. It trembled, and hummed against the palms of her hands as she released it from the power cable, an entity alive and prepared to perform its master's most intimate wishes. Demona grinned, a shaken, desolate smile. "It is time to unravel this redundant thread."  
  
****************************************  
  
"They be here." Hudson warned, the situation monitor in the infirmary showing five distinct heat signatures in the elevator shaft.  
  
"They must have gone through all the security doors." Delilah muttered, her talons unconsciously clenching into the side of the wall.  
  
"Mr. Hawkins." Hudson called towards Todd, the armored youth staring through the surgical bay window and ignoring any voices. "Todd." A more persuasive tone forced the young man's eyes towards the gargoyle elder, and Hudson found a spark he did not readily like. "Ye be our best defense in those metal shorts of yuirs..."  
  
The Epsilon helmet resealed with a snap, the sharpened brow of the featureless mask dropping over mechanical eyes. The wings unfolded, the steel flechettes attached like feathers trembling as the titanium pinions outstretched and tested the air, the weaponry roused to life and priming for use. "Stay here."  
  
****************************************  
  
A rush of air pushed out the sterling elevator doors, followed by a drum of fire engulfing the entire shaft and erupting though the doors with such force as to catapult them down the length of the corridor. The point man emerged from the hole created when using the grenade to puncture through the locked security bulkhead bracing the doors, and swathed his rifle through the dark, sterile hall, searching with infrared eyes and a laser sight for any sign of life. He motioned silently for the others to follow, and Black emerged, followed by White and the two having taken up the rear. They had managed so far against the castle defense systems, owing to their equalizer of technology subtle and devious.  
  
"I'm getting a clearer infrared sight," the point man pointed towards the infirmary, the thick smoke like some entity crawling across the unsoiled tiling and walls, "there's nine distinct heat signatures inside the far room."  
  
"Let's move." Black ordered, drawing his weapons. "They've no doubt heard our entrance." They moved quickly but cautiously within the darkness choked by the taste and sensation of explosive, the hospital room windows bathing the opposite wall in a faint light near the end of the hall, and guiding them towards their destination. The point man lead the way, his infrared sensors seeing the smoke-filled hallway in a hue of deep indigo, azure and green without a single separating line giving distinctive contour to any shape.  
  
And unfortunately, did the titanium and carbon-plastics hide any heat signature within the cloud. A form emerged from the clearing smoke, black from black. "My home is getting torn apart." a mechanical voice boomed from the darkness. "My newly discovered and dying mother has gone into surgery." The Guild detachment stopped and aimed into the heavy cloud, the figure clearing with the glint of steel and the blurred outline of a demon. "I'm having a very, VERY bad day." The Epsilon emerged into full view, Todd impervious to the fact every Guild weapon was pointed directly towards his mask, the scarlet beams touching to cold titanium. His blades unsheathed from his arms, as did the lasers and the gatlings stowed behind his shoulders awaken, he was a walking arsenal, and a young man fueled by a shocking truth and the light stain of Rose's blood washed across his armored hide, the mindlink feeling, smelling, immersing itself in the fluid. Pride made him steel, anguish made him fearless, and anger would threaten to make him reckless. "So, which one of you wants to die first?"  
  
****************************************  
  
She climbed through the gaping hole and back into the storms, into the ensuing battle that left corpses to litter the ground within its brutal course. She would boast her power now, to the humans who waged war upon her clan and stole from her a beloved daughter. She would see them before she perhaps fortunately erased the whole of their organization from history, she would see the reminder of Angela's body lying alone on a distant floor to better ingrain her hatred and blame. Demona entered in the proper commands in the medallion's keypad embedded on the back, and roused the gate made unstable by a rush of energy incompatible with Infiniti's very lifeforce having infected the whole of Wyvern's power systems. The very power of Gaia herself had not fully melded with the technology and human-bred sorcery used to create this duplicate, but in Demona's fractured emotional state, she was far from caring. "It is...so warm..." she whispered, cradling the ability to twist the threads of time to her will.  
  
It shook fiercely, aggressively within her grasp, as if fighting against her hands clutching upon it. Charged with an energy far beyond her knowledge or understanding and as ancient as the stars, the gate spewed flames, that somehow only tickled across Demona's skin, she being the user. She smiled. It was a pleasant sensation, warmth within the coldness of death. So much death.  
  
The flames vomited through the unassuming medallion and spiraled outwards, raining flickers down on wet stone, spurred by magic and technology and the volatile fusion of energy forcing the sorcery-imbued circuitry to its limits. The winds grew, heated by the supernatural fire, and a tempest all it's own swelled in a spherical wall, expanding around the hourglass figure that was Demona. And through at all, her spine-chilling laughter told well of this machine's power, and a mental balance made dangerously unhinged by Angela's death. Spellbound, both the Guild members and clan watched as the resurrected Phoenix gate displayed its awesome might, and Sata winced at the living flames she had feared in her very dreams of stone.  
  
"Damnit, Demona!!" Xanatos suddenly yelled, entrapped within the arms of Guild members struggling to force him down. "What the hell are you doing?!!"  
  
"Mending what has come," she whispered, protected by Guild weaponry by the magical flames yawning outwards and grasping tendrils across the courtyard floor, "making right what once passed. Defying nature itself."  
  
"You know you can't change the past!"  
  
A theory about to be put to the ultimate test, as a portal opened to her side made real by the gate, a picture into another land different, yet disturbingly familiar. "You wish to see true power?" came the affirmation to any Guild who would hear, breeding malice from soft, furrowed lips. "You wish to see just how insignificant you truly are? You would all do well to remember this life," she tested the portal, feeling with her hands a rush of wind tasting of ocean salt form the other side, "for it may not come to be..."  
  
It was a declaration absolute, and all too evident of her purpose. "Oh damn..." Xanatos tried his best to muscle his way from the grasp of masked men, if only to reach Demona before she entered the gate's threshold. This would indeed ruin the carefully laid plans he had sacrificed his very bid for emancipation for. He yelled through the storms to any clan members close enough to the flames curling and fanned by the winds, "Someone, anyone, STOP HER!!!"  
  
Sata nodded mechanically in the order of the billionaire, uncaring of who sent such a demand, only concerned on the actual result. She dashed towards the portal, seeing another of her clan close enough to assist. "Broadway, help me!"  
  
He raised his head from the brunt of battle, and duty won out over personal vengeance, much to his chagrin. Following behind the samurai, they disposed of those in their path and made their way towards where Demona slipped away into oblivion, and with it the gate, and with it the power to hold this doorway open. The portal contracted and readied to seal as the two warriors neared, and Sata slipped through with Broadway behind her, the gargoyle's skin licked by flames as the doorway folded in on itself and vanished.  
  
With the momentary distraction gone, darkness and pouring rain settled back unto the courtyard, and the battle continued.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Damn..." he muttered, having fallen when mercilessly thrown to the ground, his skin still seared and tinged a light faded wine from the magical flames. His hands crawled across not stone, but fresh soil seeded with intermittent grasses, olive green and lush and an aroma delicious to his senses and matching to his deepest memories. Broadway rubbed a hand across his bruised brow ridge, finding it difficult to rise when awarded peace, quiet, and a time to grieve for his loss without a war to fight.  
  
"Broadway."  
  
He blinked his eyes to the voice and form deeply feminine, though demanding of his presence. He sighed, as a hand curled underneath his shoulder to help him to his feet, and he cleared his eyes to that of Sata's worried expression. "Where are we?" he growled bitterly, blinking back the tears in an emotional overload brought on by the lack of stimuli.  
  
"Your home." she answered all too cryptically for his liking.  
  
Broadway dragged weary eyes from the samurai towards drifting hills that rose on a slight incline and abruptly fell from sight by a cliff, and into an ocean black and reflecting a backdrop celestial and placid. A clear night so drastically changed from the besieged Manhattan skyline, with winds drifting across his lips unmarred by pollutants and mottled with the taste of sea and stardust. One structure stood out against the orchid-hued heavens, a sky infinitely filled by the brightest of stars and he widened his gaze to familiar alternating merlon running across the battlements and rising spires with the distinctive crowns. "Oh shit," he gasped, peering upon Wyvern sitting peacefully atop its ancestral cliff, before war and age would claim it, and before a single man would salvage its withering beauty and lift it above the clouds, "Scotland. Oh shit...Demona..."  
  
Sata's brow rose, indeed evolving alongside Broadway a particular idea why Demona would travel here and now of all places. "She would not dare..."  
  
"Yes," he maintained, starting for the castle, "she would."  
  
****************************************  
  
She was untouched by a thousand years of solitude and pain as she skipped across the crenellation rounding Wyvern castle's highest turret, flaming hair basking a healthy ruby crimson in moonlight golden and whole, and looked out upon the sea's glassy surface calmed by lack of wind across the Atlantic. With recent events involving her mate and the attack on the castle, she pondered words left by his future self, a distant echo of memory left that fateful night long ago. To attend the petty jealousies and angers that preyed upon her heart, to fortify herself with love and trust. She deemed such a task easier said than done.  
  
She was Goliath's angel of the night, yet to become Demona after the downfall of Wyvern by aid of her own hands, and she was now brooding upon her future with the latest Viking raid less than a night past, and the shattered remains of her brethren shown to her by her own self twenty years ago had surfaced with a vengeance, a singular image she could readily not erase from her foremost thoughts. It plagued her, as did the treatment of her species at the humans' hands yet to change in almost two entire decades. If anything, it had become worse with the ascension of Katherine to her father's throne, and her revulsion of the gargoyle race indeed had severe repercussions only waiting to erupt. And thus, her decision, like the captain of the guard, would be made in two nights. To safeguard her clan at any cost.  
  
The winds shifted suddenly, the scent of ocean saline replaced with something incredibly familiar, polished gold, perfume, and a musk she knew to be a female of her clan. A wail caressed against every curved battlement, like the banshee from myth, it was deafening and served to completely disorient the cerulean-skinned gargess and the direction of her attacker. The angel of the night turned around when hearing talons scrape across stone, and stared up into a shape almost flawlessly mirrored to her own, with ancient eyes burning scarlet. "You..."  
  
Demona swooped upon her past self, laying clenched fists to thick skin and toppling the younger gargoyle. Landing, she stalked leisurely the fallen victim who shuffled backwards and tried to regain her senses from the powerful blows to the face.  
  
Coming up against the parapet, the younger gargoyle lurched to a stop, and found a silhouette standing over her, wings flared in a posture of anger and her eyes dispelling any favor for mercy. "You are indeed a restless spirit, reflection!" she snarled against the creature towering over her, her own self having come back to haunt her, and sensing the heat of hostility blown on every snorted breath. "I am going to prevent what you showed me twenty years ago! What do you want from me this time?!"  
  
"I want to kill you."  
  
  
To be concluded... 


	3. Red Sands Part 3: Flames Of The Phoenix

79 - "Red Sands Part 3: Flames Of The Phoenix"  
  
Grand, sapphire, alive, teeming, the Earth stood against the blackness, the cold void that was the universe mottled with distant points of light ancient, and infinite. Swathed in the cloud cover of light sterling, forever churning, it stood in all majestic grace, constantly on the brink of annihilation by sentient species at a oft-clandestine but constant, exhausting war. Who could ever imagine the turmoil such a simple sphere of mud and water and molecular life could fabricate from an intricate web of evolution and seeded intelligence, what wonders astonishing and horrors terrifying that set this world apart from the airless pardon of space.  
  
If there were enough molecules of oxygen to allow any sound to vibrate across, it would be a scream of absolute agony breaking the vacant silence of celestial radiation and faded satellite signals, of a creature burning alive, his form stressed and pushed beyond the limits of mortality. A streak of fire burned the heavens, breaking through the atmosphere at an incredible rate of speed, and it burst from the clouds, leaving a connecting umbilical of red flame and black smoke, writhing as if alive. Alive and screaming. As the layers of atmosphere grew thin and vaporous, the flames consuming flesh lessened and eventually died without a sufficient source of fuel. From the scorching friction of flesh against the thinning atmosphere to the bitter, deadly cold of outer space, it was a transition shocking to a biological system even as powerful and stubbornly resistant as his own. The breath was stolen from his lungs, the weight of airlessness staggering, concaving his chest even against the bony plates as the contrast in pressure drew every molecule of oxygen to the surface of his flesh, bursting through the tissues for escape. He was bleeding into the wastes of the cosmos. He curled into a fetal form, defying the numbing pain as he hemorrhaged from every orifice, his eyes, nostrils, mouth and ears, even the great rifts in his skin where the pockets of oxygen had exploded outwards from, seeping a liquid a bright crimson against cosmic black, and slowly forming rippling puddles in the absence of gravity.  
  
Sobek drifted farther towards the stars, the momentum so powerful of his expulsion from Earth's surface that he continued to float away from even the most remote of chances to ever return. The spell that kept him constantly regenerating heralded a new form of pain, as the organic tissues in his brain starved, the oxygen escaping by means of the streams of blood flowing, exploding from his flesh. He felt as if he would implode and erupt in chorus, and in his damaged, blood-soaked vision, his eyes almost having burst from his skull from the sheer pressure, he found his adversary erupting from the atmosphere leaving a trail of emerald fire in it's wake. The clouds parted to allow the synthesis of Goliath and Alexander passage unto the dark reaches, and in his heart, he felt a welling warmth tasting bitter in the back of his throat. Fear, apprehension, dread, any would suffice to describe the emotion in Sobek's eyes near blinded by fresh blood as the lavender-skinned behemoth grew increasingly near, unbridled by the incredible pressures pushing against flesh steeled by magic. He knew the power Goliath now contained, he could taste the energy brimming from lavender flesh, familiar but rare to anything he ad known in a lifetime immersed in the study of magicks ancient before even his own ancestors. He knew what this new creature was capable of, his journey through the clouds living proof.  
  
For this new creature born of two angry mortals had thrown Sobek into orbit.  
  
It followed behind, stoic features concealing a grin beneath a squared, chiseled jaw, and a heavy brow. In a protective sheath of emerald energy, it hunted the prey it toyed with by an awesome display of power fed by gargoyle adrenaline tempered by fay magicks. It approached and eyed him hungrily from an arm's length, smiling still. "How does vulnerability feel?"  
  
Beyond the pain of his flesh regenerating the oxygen constantly bursting from his skin, Sobek expressed amazement in the fact he could hear clearly every word his adversary allowed into the vacuum. He snarled.  
  
"How does it feel to be weak? To be unable to do anything to save yourself?" Through magic, through his breath forging and stabilizing a trail of air enough to allow his words to flow and imprint themselves on the suffering Egyptian, he, they, it being a better pronoun to describe the fusion of mind and personas, berated him as he once did to the leader of Wyvern only moments ago. "We should leave you here, Sobek." it whispered as it approached the prone fetal form, studying the ruptured flesh bulging with blood vessels. "To drift aimlessly amongst the coldness of stars and metal creatures, that would rather condemn you as we would to a silent, eternal, wretched exodus." It was mean, malicious, a being fueled by the rage of battle and a cold vengeance wanting satiation, unlike the titled leader and innocent child that were the sum of its mismatched parts. One would believe such a fusion would result in the best of character, noble and virtuous, but instead, it curled its claws against the immortal's neck in a warning physically unforgettable. "Never finding absolution against the cosmic dust and solar winds that draw you farther into oblivion." Its eyes were fire, erupting from beneath a horned brow and the flowing strands of refurbished ruby red, its eyes were angry, soulless and so very deep as to somehow even flout the reflection of a scenery alien and inhospitable. "But you would somehow crawl your way back to the soils of Earth and again threaten our families as an unremitting disease consuming all we care for, or you would carry with you the secret of our mother's illness beyond the solar system. Either way, we will not allow that."  
  
A mighty fist charged with Avalon energies struck true and drew more blood from Sobek, and the impact knocked the mutated gargoyle away, and with no resistance, he flew far and long and seemingly forever, spanning the length of an entire continent rotating below in seconds and narrowly missing a communications satellite tearing past the gladiators at twice the speed of sound. The battlefield would be breathtaking if it were any concern of the combatants, but all that drove the Goliath creature was retribution, blinding duty and honor and the fact just below him, four angry, vengeful gods wreaked havoc in his protectorate.  
  
"We will have OUR revenge. We shall play OUR game." Goliath/Alexander followed in the energy field of hybrid fay sorcery, catching him quickly by digging his talons into the immortal's leg. "You shall suffer for all the pain you have caused." He drove his clenched fist through the bony plates lining Sobek's stomach and chest as organic armor, shattering them and impacting against flesh, the blood released exploding from the change in pressure. "For all the lives you have taken!" He grasped upon Sobek's arm, and snapped the bone in two, eliciting a silent cry of pain. "For daring to lay your hands to our mate!!" Two massive lavender hands positioned themselves carefully, methodically on Sobek's neck, bracing the forearm against his cheek. "FOR DARING TO THREATEN OUR UNBORN CHILD!!!" Goliath unleashed in a quick twist of both wrists in deadly skill, buried in the back of the Wyvern leader's mind and dared never to use. A crack resounded to the creature who could easily detect it with senses heightened considerably with magic, breaking Sobek's neck, and severing the spinal cord.  
  
His chin resting over his shoulder and on his armored blade, crooked, broken, Sobek's limp body floated away, rotating slightly in freefall. Yet the fusion of gargoyle and human did nothing but watch, seeing a twitch still run through Sobek's talons. The spell worked almost instantly to revive him in a numbed state, and he choked on his own tongue as Goliath merely hovered near him, as if this was all a simple experiment to gauge his healing abilities. As the nerves regenerated, his mobility returned and Sobek, grabbed his head and, ignoring the immense pain like fire, turned it back into proper place, the vertebrae snapping like dry kindling. Sobek flipped himself around and kicked Goliath underneath his chin when the chance presented itself, a movement so quick as to catch him by surprise and mar flesh through the energy field.  
  
A trickle of blood was drawn from the husk inhabited by two, and it watched with glowing green eyes as a tiny stream seeped into the vacuum. A simple scratch, healed by magic, and Goliath reciprocated by charging the field around him and striking his fist across Sobek's jaw, nearly unhinging it from the rest of the deformed skull. Sobek unleashed with a shot to his midsection, inflicting damage and pain, and struck his claws against lavender skin. More blood spilled into the emptiness, Sobek fared well, bringing his fists down on Goliath's shoulders and the nerve endings contained within. Fire and pain flared through Goliath's nervous system, but he shrugged it off and powered the energy field sustaining him from the cold depths.  
  
"That was very stupid." he whispered, laying siege to Sobek's face with his fist. Another, and another, Goliath continued to pummel the Egyptian as they passed above the continent of Australia, a sadistic rhythm to his punishment that defied human strength and even that of the most powerful of gargoyle. Sobek's features were being crushed, Goliath's fist bloodied and relentless, heaping the sum of all unbridled rage, of a leader disposed and mutilated, of a child betrayed and lost.  
  
He stopped suddenly, his eyes once bereft of sentience, now flickering with intelligence and the wisdom to overcome primal instinct, his brow creased in sympathy not for the ailing Egyptian, but for his own mental state. Two were vying for a singular method of action, Goliath's own wants conflicting with Alexander's, and the creature relented for but a second. He pulled Sobek closer, eying his facial structures knitting themselves back together. "We know what you have done, Sobek." the being spoke in two voices, one deep, one adolescent, and letting the Egyptian hear his words. "Our mother is sick because of you, your stench is all over her. We can smell magic, and yours is like sand and heat, scorched stone and the sweat of slave labor."  
  
A smile appeared beneath the crushed protruding skull of Sobek's facial armor, his resolve unaffected by the beating. His mouth slowly moved, presumably to counter the amalgamated gargoyle's accusation, and Goliath extended the energy field around Sobek, to allow a fresh breath of air to his lungs once completely imploded, to breach the gap of hostile cold.  
  
"Speak, monster," it demanded, "we will allow you a single breath to explain what you have done, and a single chance to reverse it."  
  
Sobek sucked in a breath of cool, created oxygen, and stared down Goliath defensively. He chose to remain silent to further aggravate the gargoyle, and it served its purpose well.  
  
"Speak!" it roared, filling the pocket with a bellows fiery and malcontent. "Or we shall remove your jaw and force you to inscribe the answer with your own blood!"  
  
"...I have changed my mind..." Sobek whispered. "I believe I WILL eat your mate after all."  
  
Brighter than the sun, and seen throughout the islands of Japan and Hawaii as a massive flare of energy erupting through the sky, the merge of Goliath and Alexander expressed their dislike to the barb audibly permissible by magic. His scream heralding the power to flatten buildings if allowed to carry on any such atmosphere below exploded across the pocket of air, popping like a bubble, and instead it created a small tremor spreading outwards amongst the stars. "Burn."  
  
Goliath gripped to Sobek's frame and pushed with all his might, throwing the immortal down towards where the North American continent slowly came into view beneath the dark layering of stormcloud, breeding small charges of lightning within it's epicenter above the East coast. Such speed without resistance, until Sobek met the first tier of atmosphere, and as was his journey from the Earth's surface painful, this was tenfold. As the atmosphere thickened, so did the friction against his flesh, tearing, clawing, burning, liquefying tissues and melting any semblance of a humanoid shape from the deformed skeletal structure. A flash of scarlet enveloped him as he descended on a sharp angle, and before the substance of his muscles dissolved completely from the intense heat, he wrapped his wings around himself and shored his melting form as he descended into Earth's unforgiving atmosphere.  
  
****************************************  
  
Through the rain, through the darkened, churning cloud cover, she watched the streak of fire appear and light up the entire sky, reflecting a deep orange against the orchid billows. It pierced the veils of storm at an incredible rate, like a comet or meteor, leaving behind a wake of smoke and flame, and an earsplitting shriek. Elisa stood high on a precipice of debris from a crumbled building, dragging with her fingers sodden strands of raven silk from her sight of the object. It impacted in the section of Manhattan destroyed by the gods, and Elisa braced herself for the explosion in the folds of her long leather coat, a massive shockwave of air and dust sweeping past her and the other officers. A sound erupted, a plume of fire rose into the pouring rains, and Elisa returned her eyes to where the object had landed, a crater twenty feet wide by her guess within the ruins and blemished by flames. "Sobek."  
  
"What the hell was that?!" screamed an officer to her side, watching with wide, terrified eyes as the sky filled with chunks of flaming rubble.  
  
"Never mind that..." came another voice, the fear inherent obscured by sheer, consuming astonishment. Another policeman looked up beneath the brim of his hat to see the descent of a creature undergone a metamorphosis from the injured gladiator having battled within the streets only moments ago. The field wicked any moisture from his skin, the lightning daring to strike close enough was deflected, Goliath was untouched by even nature's wrath. "What the hell is THAT?"  
  
She knew the manifestation from her deepest memories, the proud stance, and the deep, sumptuous shade of lavender. Elisa gazed upon her husband falling from the sky and following the path of the toppled immortal, sheathed in emerald magic, a telltale sign of his merging with Alexander. His wings of energy swept open and slowed his descent, and though superfluous, it was a trait imprinted on Goliath's physical gestures by pure instinct. He settled to the ground aside the crater, the energy literally dripping from his body and spilling to the soil in almost a liquid form. "Jesus Christ..." Elisa muttered, seeing malice replace compassion in his eyes, and an insatiable want for revenge curling his fists and bulging the veins knotted under his skin. "And here I was worrying about him dying from bloodloss." She turned from over her shoulder and eyed the remaining cops. "Okay, boys," she ordered, her eyes bearing her defiance, "get out."  
  
"What?" one protested quickly. "We've got reports three entire U.S. airforce squadrons have failed at taking those things out. The entire section's been evacuated, and we're not leaving you alone in the middle of this mess, especially with those two."  
  
Elisa moved her eyes away, to where the remnant of her husband slowly declined into the crater. "Trust me. Take everyone you can find and get back to the military blockades. This might get messy."  
  
Without a choice in the matter, without any idea of what to do if they indeed stayed, they slowly backed away, and towards the blockades several blocks afar. The last man to leave, a young man, a boy in all aspects, watched the leather-coated detective navigate her way through the rubble. "Where are you going?!" he called after her, receiving no response. "Detective?!!"  
  
Elisa headed deeper into the destroyed neighborhood. "To reach my husband." she replied quietly. "Or whatever the hell he's become..."  
  
****************************************  
  
She was lightning in speed, and fire in fury, a creature of vengeance in a place not her own anymore, the scent of the ripe Scottish bluffs and salt from the ocean horizon driving her into a frenzy, a frequent reminder of everything she had lost. Moonlit skin turned a spattered crimson, the warmth of another's blood delicious, she a warrior without the burden of a conscience. It was suicide she knew for sure, this battle, and she welcomed death in any form.  
  
The younger woman struggled to fight back, swinging aimlessly her fist, and easily dodged by her attacker who sensed the fatigue setting in by skills slurred and slow. Surprised by seeing her future self arrive one more to her ancestral home, she was unawares of her deadly intent, and thus, injured and spent, waged a losing battle against not a being of flesh, but a force of nature.  
  
"Do not worry." the shapely attacker quoted, from a distant memory, as she drove her fist into the younger gargess' face, spreading blood about their battlefield of the tallest turret kissing the star-mottled sky. "Do not wait or look for this catastrophe. Live in the moment." She crossed her fist against the younger female's jaw, the crack of bone resounding and the sudden sharp pain erupting through her knuckles invigorating. Every attack upon her adversary was pure ecstasy, channeling an entire lifetime of failure and death into her assault against a mirror image brimming with the scent of Goliath's musk. She had savagely attacked without any quarter, and even with the younger gargess' battle prowess, she was no match for the warrior forged from a thousand years.  
  
She fell back against the crowned turret edge, the chance to breathe through a constricted throat at last taken with such a swift, and brutal confrontation. "Why?" the beaten gargoyle protested, through swollen lips tasting of her blood.  
  
Demona lay her foot into her younger self's midsection, garnering a cry of pain, mewled from the base of her throat as she spit a trickled drool of blood to the stones. "Attend the petty jealousies and angers that prey upon your heart." she chanted mechanically, ensuring her words were burned into the younger female's mind as retribution for ignoring such a blatant warning.  
  
"Why do you...do this?!"  
  
Demona never heeded the pleas spoken in her voice, beyond caring for any such whine or protest. "Fortify yourself with love and trust," she dragged her fallen self from the stones, "and you need not fear this future." Her hands found themselves clenched and guided into her counterpart's flesh by their own volition, pounding, breaking, and demolishing the younger girl by all comparisons. She saw but red in her field of vision, hair, blood and rage, threatening to push her beyond that edge she precariously walked. "But most of all, fulfill the vows of love you make, for they can surely save you." Hoisting the younger gargoyle to her height by favor of her hands around the slender neck, made slippery by fresh flowing blood, Demona met her eyes, drooping beneath a brow deprived of its golden decoration and deeply cut, and reflecting a youth stolen away. "Do you remember those words?!" she screamed, igniting the calm, ocean air around her with an almost tangible pain. "Spoken by our one true love we took for granted?!! Do you remember?!!" She shook violently her counterpart, the younger woman struggling to remain lucid through the violent assault against her frame. "But you did not choose to listen, did you? You chose to kill your clan instead!!"  
  
"I do not know...of what you are speaking..." the younger version of Demona whispered, her throat being crushed.  
  
Demona sneered, striking a closed fist to her counterpart's stomach. "To spawn a thousand years of pain, of death and war, all to end up killing your only daughter, your only accomplishment worth mention..." Tears made a descent, curling the length of cheekbone and softened features to journey down faded cerulean, as Demona relived Angela's death with a forced aid of blood caked upon her skin. "Our beautiful daughter, lying dead a thousand years in the future..."  
  
Using the hesitation, the native to this timeline broke away and stumbled backwards, breathing heavily and nursing wounds intricately carved by the wild and relentless swipes of talon. "I have no daughter!" she managed, a bout of anger giving rise to a fleeting surge of strength. "Only a single egg among many under the constant threat of death!" They stared each other off, the younger watching through blood-hazed eyes for any movement from the elder, more like an animal sizing up her prey. "And I will ensure their safety...no matter what."  
  
"Yes, you will, won't you?" she accused, holding herself ready, lest the younger try to escape. "And in doing so will create an entire world from just your hands and arrogance that damned everything and all."  
  
"How can I be held responsible for a thousand years of history?!" she screamed back, wiping blood from her lip. "What happens beyond the sphere of my actions is none of my control or concern!"  
  
"An answer I would expect." A smile broke out unexpectedly, dark, and bemused by the entire situation yet to fully register, and as such, the risk of the catastrophic cost of her actions as yet truly unfathomable. "Do you wish to know what is truly, miserably amusing? You will actually try to find peace a millennium from now, to try and seek redemption, but that will prove to be as big a deception as your existence." Eyes flared demon red, bathing the skin surrounding a deep-set gaze hell-bent and deranged with a brilliance breathtakingly stunning, and terrifying. "You are evil, and beyond any such dream of salvation."  
  
The tone used brought a tremor to her wings, rippling the scalloped membranes. It was her voice, but a quality that seemed so very cold, and unstable. "You speak as if we are separate," the younger half of Demona yelled back towards her elder self, near desperate to fend off an attacker seemingly beyond the reach of rational thought, "we are one and the same!"  
  
"No," she bared her fanged teeth as she stalked forwards, heralding an end to any more dialogue, "you are my beginning, I am your end. A perfect circle that shall break tonight."  
  
****************************************  
  
They hurried, left to traverse the ground without any structure to gain altitude on their wings, still uneasy of their surroundings, one vigilant, and the other mournfully nostalgic. They approached the oddly grounded castle illuminated by orange flame ghostly, and flickering atop the guarded walls, a contrast of torchlight and shadow primitive and wondrous and making this palace seem far bigger than its already impressive size.  
  
Through the opened gate, Sata led the way, finding it strange to see the interior quadrangle of castle Wyvern replete with a bustling community of peasants taking refuge within the high walls, the samurai passing by women and children who never bothered to take a second glance towards the battered creature of jade and wing running by them. Except perhaps, to ensure their eyes would not deceive them of legends come to life, protecting them as they slept. As she headed for the entrance inside, leading towards the main courtyard and turrets, she noticed an absence behind her, and slowed her journey to peer past her caped wing. Broadway had strayed, and she found him slowing his gait and looking lamentably around him, allowed the chance to relive a life so long ago. A childhood among his rookery kin, lost by circumstance beyond his choosing or control, and she wondered if even with Angela's death, he would find himself at home here. She had been presented with the chance to revisit Ishimura in her own century, and she too was hesitant in being torn away. "Broadway." she minded him, startling the burly gargoyle and rousing his focus back to her and their task.  
  
He shook his head lightly, blinking his eyes. "Sorry." he whispered, rejoining her side as they climbed the steps to the main level. "Old memories." His eyes fell to his hands, that which had deprived sentient beings of life, the same innocent child who grew up in this place now become a killer. "It's...it's less than two days before the massacre, and all this...will be gone..."  
  
"I know this must be hard for you, my friend," she consoled him, brushing a look of solace across her shoulder with tapered, almond eyes reflecting the firelight, "as is losing Angela, but we have a much more pressing matter to contend with."  
  
He nodded briefly, his eyes threatening to tear up and mar his vision when even just a passing scent or female voice would remind him of Angela. "Save the world now, grieve later...I know." he responded, resentment clouding the hollow brogue, a taloned thumb leading to the edge of his eye to clear his sight. "Same old story."  
  
"We shall honor her accordingly," she promised, emerging from the covered entryway and onto the level just beneath the main courtyard, "after we stop your mother-in-law from doing something very stupid."  
  
"Halt, stranger."  
  
Her instincts stirred by the deep voice seeming to scatter across every buttress and bulwark, Sata stopped dead in her tracks, a bristle through her wings, an irritation running up her spine, and where the unkempt tress slackened from an intricately tied style and spilled loose strands across the nape of her neck, erupted a trail of gooseflesh with a presence so near and gone unseen from her senses. She nudged slender hands to the leather handle of the sheathed katana to her side, sensing the approach of an obvious sentry. Sata looked above to see the woodland-skinned male land across from her, with long silver hair and two horns erupting from the sterling mane and tapering to a sharpened point. He looked of distrust in expression and a wary stance, Sata knew, and she kept her hand to her katana, with the other folded behind her back and gesturing to encourage Broadway to stay out of sight. "Konichiwa, friend."  
  
His eyes roamed quickly and ravenously her form, impressed by the strong feminine curves, but intrigued mostly by her unusual manner of dress, her kimono torn and tattered, and her injuries, her skin bruised and bloodied. "I don't know you, stranger, and your wear and manner of speaking are unknown to me." His voice was a low growl, the gargoyle rubbing his chin, perhaps concealing an engrossed smirk. "State your business here, and explain why you felt it necessary to intrude on our castle so blatantly."  
  
"I cannot say," she deflected his inquiries to keep her involvement in this timeline to a minimum, a perfected ability performed many times over, "only that you must allow me to complete my task."  
  
"An answer weak and lacking of reason, stranger." he snorted, noticing her hand tighten around the hilt of her sword, stained by fresh blood, the scent detectable even from his position. Her leading foot crept forwards, readying her carriage. "You appear to have been in battle. Is this true?"  
  
The mistrust was evident, her unfamiliarity and the bloodied weapon hanging from her robes making difficult any confidence in her words. Sata cocked a ridge to his line of questioning, and answered cautiously, "Yes."  
  
"Against who?"  
  
She sighed, and peeked from beneath her delicate brow to scan the turrets and rooftops, to search the exterior of the castle amongst the shadows deep and consuming, and aiding any concealment of Demona's whereabouts. "You must let me through, brethren." she tried once more, indeed angering the Wyvern gargoyle with her forced ambiguity. "It is a matter of grave importance."  
  
"Brother, explain." another gargoyle inquired of his rookery sibling when emerging from a distant entryway, hunched in posture and colored a dusty cobalt blue. A grouping of winged creatures followed, a few with fresh kill strung to sturdy poles. A hunting party, having arrived home at the most inopportune of moments. "Who is this?"  
  
"While we were out hunting for tonight's feast, it seems an intruder took advantage of our absence." he explained, his stolid brother glancing between his kin and the samurai. "She has recently killed, I can smell the blood fresh upon her sword."  
  
Sata surveyed the entire brood standing a few lengths across from her, wonder mixed with irritation of being caught and slowed in their chase. The Wyvern clan, before their betrayal and destruction, now stood before her, studying her suspiciously, a skepticism of her allegiance suggested clandestinely in dark eyes passed between brother and sister and elder alike. They were known, faintly, told of by way of stories from a weaver through time, and such tales were now given substance by the participants of adventures standing in front of her, presumably to block her path into the bowels of the castle interior. "Please," she was near to pleading, her honor and pride sacrificed for sake of the imminent danger to the timeline, "let me through."  
  
"And just why do you wish entry?" a very familiar voice echoed throughout the courtyard, a soft rumble denoting of gentleness, but authoritative, serving to part the crowd and allow an enormous form to take its place in front. His wings swayed in the gentle, salt-laden Atlantic breeze as if some living, regal cloak, settled high above shoulders impossibly broad, banked rearward and thick to hold such heavy arms. "What reason do you have for such an intrusion into the very heart of our home?"  
  
Sata raised her brow, her mouth dropping open to breathe a name both respected and feared, "Goliath..."  
  
Broadway winced from his place in the shadows, in seeing the younger version of Goliath livid, folding his massive arms against an even bigger chest, puffed and proud, the lavender gargoyle as imposing in any time period. "Oh damn."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Move! Move!!" he yelled, dodging from precisely aimed fire strafing in time with the thunder erupting above, perhaps swallowing whole the strident sound, but not the destructive power. The golden armor he boasted as a sizeable scar from battle, having replaced entire portions of his skin, soaked in the stray blasts sheared across him where his speed had not yet been enough. Having already suffered a few direct blasts, his synth-skin, the layering of synthetic tissue allowing him the appearance of near-normality, had since disrupted, exposing the incredible amounts of gilded titanium and circuitry underneath. Lexington was a blur, his incredible dexterity enhanced by the cybernetics allowing him to stay ahead of the Guild members, a relentless wave of darkness in literal form and figurative manifestation. "Keep moving, don't let them overwhelm you!!"  
  
It was growing desperate, only four gargoyles remained outside to defend the castle, with Xanatos and MacBeth aiding in any way they could. Between Mother's dwindling cannons, the diminished clan was giving their all to defend their home, being slowly, mercilessly driven back towards the hole in the outer wall.  
  
But it seemed with the contingent of Guild having already breached the walls, their strategy was not to try for the opened hole any longer, but to destroy anything moving, anything inhuman, and thus, a target.  
  
Lexington became the link between them all, using his computer-aided senses and expertise in strategy to keep them alive, and with the loss of Brooklyn from the battlefield, he became the bond between the warriors, the voice of order in chaos.  
  
Where Desdemona and Othello fought in perfect tandem with the other's movements, bonded by love and the ability to watch even the most subtle of gestures, Shadow was the wildcard, unpredictable, uncontrollable and bloodthirsty. He was willingly losing himself in the battle and moving farther into the crowd, away from the remaining defenders. "Spend your shots freely, humans!" he goaded, his movements a blur, the only indication being the sheeting rain spattering and abruptly changing direction all around him. "I am still not impressed." Thrust, parry, swipe, contact, fist to flesh, cartilage tore, bone cracked, blood rushed, the flashes of gold erupting around his dark form were his nunchuku, whirring into perfect circles and striking lethally with each blow.  
  
Lexington, though inexperienced compared to most in ways of war, knew all too well the look of sheer desire, of bloodlust on the ninja's dark features, how he reveled in every hit, in every kill, as the Guild members flooded like a wave, exhausting their energy shields against Mother's cannons and leaving themselves open to Shadow's attacks. "Shadow?!" he yelled, but his voice did not reach. "Shadow!!"  
  
"Leave him be, lad!" minded MacBeth, his gruff tone similar to sandpaper scraping over his tongue, the former king crossing Lexington's path and swerving his aim over the quickly dodging webwing to upend three Guild soldiers. "Let him lose himself! Let him be what he truly is, a weapon!"  
  
"We've heard what happens when he loses control!" Lexington growled back, his argument made tangible with the bestial screams erupting over the thunder, the storms now centered directly above the Eyrie building. "We have enough enemies to worry about without him pulling a Vader and turning on us!"  
  
"I've lost over forty Steel Clan robots and more than a hundred drones." Xanatos reported from behind him as he fed his laser into a Guild, fed statistics by a continuous stream of data poured directly into his suit. His defenses were being slowly overwhelmed, and he deemed the cost quite staggering, and the ensuing clean up of the wreckage an annoyance indeed. "Now's not the time to worry for something as inconsequential as his soul, or lack thereof."  
  
"Stone cold, Xanatos."  
  
"We will not win this fight by coddling one of the best chances we have." He watched Shadow with intrigue between his own battles, wondering just how the ninja would prove as an adversary rather than an ally. The billionaire carved marble lips into a smile beneath his helmet, perhaps hoping for an even greater challenge than Goliath ever was. "The risk to all of our souls is considerable to death."  
  
Lexington's eyes glanced from the dark tumult that was Shadow to the dead body of Angela lying distant, cold and wetted from the constant rains. Lightning struck, setting aflame the entire sky and alighting her features for a moment suspended in time, she was beautiful even in death. "We've already lost enough tonight..."  
  
He threw a hand to his temple, his eyes itching, and what he thought to be another blaze of lightning revealed much more, a blink of white permeating his sight for just a split second. A hiccup, in time and space and all of reality.  
  
Lexington's visual bionics caught the flicker in even the weakest of visible light, the entire spectrum seeming to blink from existence and suddenly come back again whole and healed. Distracted by such an unusual occurrence, he checked his cybernetics to ensure he was not damaged further than what the onscreen diagnostic display flashing before his eyes would divulge. "What the hell was that?"  
  
****************************************  
  
"What the hell was that?" she whispered from beneath her surgical mask, looking up from the gutted torso and into the surgical suite, having noticed the instant flash. Such a distraction in a time of numbing silence and needed concentration, Annika was drawn from the surgery by something far beyond her comprehension, but not escapable to her senses set aflame.  
  
Dr. Pierce, his absorption into his patient concrete, merely continued to hold Rose's life in his hands, several major organs severed by Sobek's sword. "Clamp."  
  
The gargoyle turned back, and mechanically reached for the tool demanded by the doctor become almost cold in his focus throughout the sounds of battle raging above, and through the floor and operating table trembling with each explosion. "Didn't you notice that?"  
  
As he stitched together the gash more like a chasm throughout Rose's insides, he let himself join in on a one-sided conversation. "What?"  
  
"That...blink."  
  
The good doctor's eyes fluttered, the only portion of human left behind the garb of white gown transforming him into a creature similar to the roosted clan upon the parapets, a savior, a protector. "You mean where everything went white for a split-second?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"No." Blood spurted across his gloves, as he carefully maneuvered the pieces of Rose's intestinal tract back into proper position. "Suction."  
  
"Dr. Pierce?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Is that...gunfire?"  
  
****************************************  
  
He stood his ground, steel and titanium and carbon-plastics molded to a bare-humanoid appearance, and taking the full brunt of enough kinetic, destructive energy to make bright half the island of Manhattan if somehow channeled in such a beneficial manner. In purest human instinct, he had raised his arms in front of his face, the delicate link from machine to man translating the compressed beams of energy and bullets dancing across his armor to slight stings tickling across his flesh. The pain, reduced from the true agony if deprived of the futuristic shell, registered through the mindlink software, and Todd clenched his teeth, swallowing a scream of anger on the verge of vomiting into his suit in fear.  
  
He held his place, and not once, even in panic or the sheer momentum of the weaponry against him, stepped back to allow the small but adequate contingent of Guild any advance on the hospital entrance just behind him. They had started firing relentlessly, with projectiles sharpened to pierce steel and energy blasts designed to melt flesh on contact, engulfing the strange winged suit in a hail of their greatest tools for vengeance.  
  
Peace by their gun, their world by their convention, and Todd, a human collaborator of these creatures, suffered for it.  
  
"...shit..." It was a muffled whisper from behind the Epsilon's mask, as the young man truly had no idea how long he could withstand such a deadly armory, the armor's sensors screaming, if anything for him to move from the Guild's path. His breathing increased, the suit knew. His heartrate was racing beyond the established safety limits, the suit worried.  
  
The ricochets gutted the hallway outside the hospital, drywall and protective steel underlay, wood and sterile paint, tile and linoleum, all was being torn apart by the bullets bouncing off the titanium alloy skin. The occupants of the hospital quickly moved the wounded from near the entrance, the wall against the corridor occasionally bleeding bullets into their haven, an occasional strike shattering a distant glass vial or beaker, a reminder effective in its imagery and message, that the war had at last come to them. Hudson pulled Maria from her sheets and into his arms, the captain offering no protest as they moved to a safer location. Delilah, Iliana and the twins moved Matt's bed and the attached equipment keeping him alive into the laboratory, to safeguard their adopted family in the chamber deeper and far more secured. Nudnik and Bronx took cover, the gargoyle beasts scrambling recklessly for any place to hide.  
  
Todd closed in his wings to protect the armor, becoming scorched by the assault, and as Black allowed his underlings to continue firing, he simply released his empty clips to the ground and jammed the guns' vacant slots onto fresh clips attached to his belt, reloading easily and instantly. He was noticeably impressed with the show of defiance by the strange armored being, both surprised by his stand and sickened by his choice of sides. He figured the steel creature to have a human host, the shell remotely humanoid in shape and unable to house the larger gargoyle form. But unknown to the leader of the Guild between his meticulous preparations, was just what his team's actions were enacting upon the suit's operator under the stress. A dangerous fusion of desperation and reckless youth were stirred within a steel cauldron, and Todd opened his eyes to peer upon the group of men behind the bullets ricocheting from his mask, and the one centered in the middle, the leader, the key, the man who allowed one simple fact to elude his well-thought strategy from the very beginning.  
  
Cloaked in one hundred and fifty million dollars worth of near-indestructible armament, Todd was becoming angry.  
  
****************************************  
  
Over her shoulder, with her talons entrenched deeply into thick gargoyle flesh, Demona flipped her younger half onto the stones with such brutality as to crack the stone flooring with the brunt of her adversary's weight, and the force with which she used, intended to break, to kill the corporeal essence of her pain. The irony of her struggle, of challenging an inner demon given substance was lost on Demona, rational thought and an intelligence shrewd and near-unparalleled buried beneath her instinct to end the great pain in her breast. As she drove her fists into her younger self's face and midsection, bruising and splitting flesh, she salivated as if she hungered for this fight, dripping from bared fangs and skidding across swollen, snarled lips.  
  
"I have brought with me the resources to make this quick, demon," she snarled, each blow an addiction stronger than the last, "but I am enjoying this far too much." The upper hand was Demona's, from almost the beginning as even with her counterpart's great skill in battle, her naiveté and overconfidence was unprepared for the ferocity of a jaded shard from a shattered mirror image. The elder gargoyle hit her once more, and used her elbow spur to inflict serious damage across her chest, and that of her knee to crush all semblance of this wretched creature that, to her, never should have existed.  
  
"...my...love..." her plea to her lover was a gurgled expulsion forced through punctured lungs, using her good arm to dig her talons into the stone to try and drag herself away from this psychotic having donned her face, a mask twisted and gnarled beyond any recognition. "...goliath..."  
  
"You will not cry for anyone, demon." Demona hissed, clamping her claws into the arm of her younger self, halting any escape attempt. "You will not plead for a life empty of purpose or merit." She raked her talons across the neck of the woman pinned underneath her, releasing a steady stream of blood from her larynx, and ending any verbal protest in a river of viscous red pouring into the cracks of fitted stone. "All you will do is bleed into the timeline, and pave the way for redemption with your death, or oblivion with my failure." She wrenched her younger self closer by pulling on the strands of fire, her breath nipping at the delicate flesh of her counterpart's earlobe. "Either way, you cease to be."  
  
Demona screamed, flooding the constellations above ten centuries different with a beast's lament, and continuing with her assault.  
  
****************************************  
  
His brow was curled defiantly, and Broadway knew the Wyvern leader to be unimpressed with trespassers in his castle. He knew the determined expression that covered the younger Goliath's face, unwilling to believe so readily even someone of his own species, and stubborn to the point of obstinacy. This Goliath was almost paranoid in his inability to trust anyone in an age of barbarism, only those who proved themselves worthy by blood and battle would gain his faith, and Broadway knew getting past the lavender behemoth would be a difficult task among many. "Damnit, we don't have time for this..." he whispered to Sata, his breath turned to a snarl as he watched with great interest and despondency the collection of clan from the shadows, a confliction of emotions churning the contents of his stomach. "Every second we waste means Demona gains the advantage."  
  
"I am well aware." Sata deflected her answer behind her, surreptitious in her concealment of her companion.  
  
"I will not ask again." Goliath stated firmly, his tone dark, and insistent.  
  
"Please trust in me, Goliath," Sata tried once more, the lavender giant surprised in the fact she knew of his name given to him by the human royal court, "trust in the fact there may be a consequence far beyond your comprehension." Her eyes narrowed, the raven charcoal within sparked with a scarlet ember faint in its glow. "Allow me passage."  
  
The gargoyle to be named Othello in a distant time sneered, favoring the challenge by a solitary woman, "Or what?"  
  
Her scream echoed across the medieval structure and surrounding arboreal landscape swallowing the cliffside castle, dancing, bouncing, reflecting from the labyrinth of cornice and embattled wall, mirroring an anguished soul prepared to undo all that was if she could only succeed against the limits of nature and time imposed on the mortal realm. Though faded somewhat of the intensity when reaching their distance, it was enough to place her location far atop Goliath's turret. They knew it to be a portent of war, and thus, they needed desperately to get through the blockade of Wyvern gargoyles.  
  
Goliath looked up to his daytime roost, the voice so like his angel of the night exploding across the drapery of stars and rolling breeze, but demonic, angry. "My love?"  
  
Sata immediately snapped her predatory gaze towards the turret, the prize found at last. "Broadway, we've found her."  
  
He nodded victoriously from the shadows. "Good, now we have to stop her..." he trailed off. His hand tingled, and he looked, only to see a shimmer passing along aquamarine skin, fading to nothingness and healing again, an instant metamorphosis, telling of the damage being done. "What the hell?" It was a sign he had hoped against all odds he would never see, the unraveling of his existence with the intrusion into the past. "Oh no..."  
  
****************************************  
  
MacBeth's aim was thrown off as he fired against a Guild, his hand, his arm, his entire body instantly phasing, a numbing sensation come and gone and enough to affect his pinpoint shot. It seemed as if all of time skipped a cosmic beat, and all were affected in one small way or another, clan and Guild. They shook off the disorientation and fell back into their battle.  
  
So unsettled by the occurrence, Lexington barely dodged in time from the path of a Guild cannon, flipping from the way as Othello stepped in to fend off the smaller gargoyle's attacker. "Something just made my implants go nuts." he muttered, the phenomenon registering on his cybernetic systems as a disruption though brief, but severe enough to leave a faint imprint across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  
  
MacBeth looked up into the rains, into pure, unadulterated power collected into a singular instrument now more than just a nuisance in the midst of war. "And something is affecting th' storms." It raged above them, lightning spewing from the center of the vortex swirling above Wyvern's ascending turrets like fists of an irritated deity, and it seemed to be growing stronger. It knew, like some intelligent entity, and it sensed some force to be tampering with the delicate mechanisms of nature. A brow sterling sliver lowered over eyes containing a millennium of experience, yet having never seen anything like this. "Mother nature be angry tonight."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Distortion is citywide." the cold computer voice of Mother seeped through the speakers of the computer womb. "Initiating datalink with Xanatos satellite network." From above the skies came the data from the numerous satellites of Xanatos Enterprises channeled into Mother's computer banks, silent sentinels used more effectively to gather intelligence from anywhere in the world with the simple guise and function of communication. "Distortion effects confirmed as worldwide. EM field distortion increasing, atmospheric intensity increasing."  
  
Nicole sat facing the monitor with Trinity in one arm and a salvaged Guild weapon in the other, the reporter secured in the castle's main computer room once again, and watching as Mother's sensors tried to discern the ripples in reality. "What is it?"  
  
Mother seemed to pause in her answer, the battle outside still incredibly taxing to her resources. "Unknown...there is no known source for the entire phenomenon. Each interruption appears as a deformation across every sensor both internal and external...and is growing stronger with every passing distortion."  
  
****************************************  
  
"By Gaia..." she whispered, bearing the brunt of having her very lifeblood drained out into the external weaponry. Infiniti could feel the hiccups as though they were a physical assault, her attunement to the Earth and its spirit acting as an umbilical, feeding the pain from a mother to the child trapped and helpless within the womb "...the strands of time are hemorrhaging chaos..."  
  
Her eyes fell from her manner of imprisonment to Owen, lying unconsciousness below her strapped into the hospital stretcher, and just meters away, but so far from her reach. "Demona...you have no idea how important you truly are to this world..." she whispered, her unique senses dulled by the steel ring, though unnecessary to discern what was causing such chaos in the fabric of reality. Her power had helped nurse the recreated Phoenix gate, a piece of her existed within the small, unassuming medallion and served as a window to see the journey taken by Demona into another time. It was a terrifying sight, seeing firsthand where the most intricate threads of space-time had frayed. "...to eternity and time...to every soul born in the last one thousand years...you made their destiny..."  
  
She bled tears that trailed in great contrast her cream skin become chalky, that fell and spattered to the cold sterling of the Vault, a trickle of blood swirled within the clear, almost translucent liquid, a sign of the damage being done to her form. "...do not so readily throw it away..."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Something's happening. And it's not good."  
  
Sata clenched her hand, numb from the distortion making her flesh intangible, flickering between jade green and oblivion and then returning to some semblance of normalcy. She was conflicted with experience set against proven fact, with so many attempts to change the past gone unproductive, yet so many loopholes exploited. "But time is supposed to be immutable," she echoed the theory thought absolute, "it cannot be changed."  
  
Broadway knitted his ridges together, never having believed in any theory undeviating and adamant in his life tinged by wonder and tragedy. "Demona's one hell of a focal point in our clan's history, she pretty much created the last thousand years. If there's enough damage done in the past, it'll probably cause hell in the present and every single future timeline from here on out." He rubbed his hands together, the contact of real flesh relieving. "I'm no scientist, but if she manages to kill her past self, it'll either change everything we know, or probably make the universe shit itself."  
  
Almond-shaped eyes widened to the danger become tenfold. "If she succeeds..."  
  
His brow lowered over winsome eyes tortured and exhausted. "...she might unravel everything that she made in her one decision to allow the castle to be raided."  
  
Sata realized, for truly she and her mate had influenced many in their travels, and in even the most restrained of manipulations throughout the eras she had visited had changed time for either better or worse. "But with Demona's disruption being so severe," she nodded in agreement, "this particular timeline is in the most danger...and could most likely disentangle. Instead of altering every event from now on," she rubbed a hand against her bloodied brow, "it would obliterate everything..."  
  
"Give or take. Like I said, I'm no scientist...just a cook."  
  
It was more desperate than she ever believed, and she centered back on Goliath, who seemed interested in her one-sided conversation to an invisible companion. "We don't have time for this, now let me through!"  
  
Flicking thinned eyes from his turret to the stranger, anxious to aid his love, he waved his clan into a defensive posture and grumbled, "No."  
  
"As you wish." Sata unsheathed the katana and tested the weight of the blade in nimble fingers, her eyes trained on the Wyvern clan spreading themselves out and readying for a fight.  
  
Ensured his clan would deal with the trespassers, Goliath moved behind them presumably to run to his mate, and as he started up the stairs to the main courtyard, the wind hailed a sudden movement, and the sound of steel taking flight. He wrenched his neck from the path of the object that embedded itself into the stairway arch, a small butterfly sword, the stout weapon rooted deeply into the stone by way of the blade made razor sharp.  
  
"You desire to make this a physical fight," the samurai warned, running her larger blade past her eyes and reflecting a stunned clan in the mirror finish stained a wine red, "so be it."  
  
He immediately shot from behind her, erupting from the shadowed crook like a force of nature himself. He left a howl in his wake, to distract, to release the fire in his lungs, to make himself appear larger than life. In his weight, his bulk and the speed behind his suicide run he was unstoppable, and aimed for the crowd of gargoyles, his family dead and dust and in his way. Broadway plowed through them effortlessly, aiming for a stunned Goliath frozen in place, seeing this member of his clan appearing twice as big and vengeful. Broadway rammed the lavender gargoyle, his shoulder butted into Goliath's midsection, and trampled him to the stairway, breaking apart the stone behind the force of the impact, the cracks spreading in spider-web trails.  
  
Sata leapt in to defend her companion, and swerve any questions to his familiarity by veering her sword into the group and redirecting their attention. She herded them from the stairway leading up onto the main courtyard with a lash of steel that defied even the greatest of skill and velocity, the blade become undetectable if but for a gentle breeze roused by her movements. Othello backed his clan from the samurai, as she quickly handled the woodland-skinned gargoyle who dared venture too close by butting the end of her sword directly between his browridges. He fell, and she could not readily conceal the smirk.  
  
Goliath struggled to lift himself, winded, the breath crushed from his lungs by the damage wrought by Broadway. "...You..." he wheezed, looking up into his younger charge's face, altered by age and hardened by grief. "But...you appear different...larger, and certainly stronger..."  
  
"I grew up." Broadway caught the tip of Goliath's chin in an uppercut that would have taken his head off if not inhumanly resilient, throwing the gargoyle back against the covered stairway. "Sorry about this, Goliath," his voice was apologetic, as he stalked forwards, "but it's better for all concerned of you're not involved." Goliath shook his head, clearing his vision only to have another fist fill the entirety of his gaze, and then, darkness. Standing over Goliath's toppled body, Broadway breathed wistfully, "You know, there was always a part of me that wanted to know how I'd fare against you...guess I got my answer." He turned from the disposed leader to Sata, playing an accomplished waltz against the clan trying to catch her unawares. But her sword proved the greater threat, and she managed to keep them at bay.  
  
"Go!!" she screamed at him from over her shoulder. "Now!!"  
  
He nodded and stepped over Goliath's prone form, heading for the courtyard and the tallest structure in Wyvern.  
  
****************************************  
  
She followed the trail of debris, of broken streets and gutted homes barely standing, the once pristine rows lining the labyrinthine paths now crumbling, and wretched. The absence of the constant city drone was unsettling, of vehicles roaming and screaming, of the chatter of a million beings coalesced, of technology lifting its voice high into the skies, she found this once-loathed background noise become a characteristic now missed. Only the sound of her heartbeat ringing against her ribcage was the driving force behind her dash through the ruined section of Manhattan, of the thunderous pulse echoing in her ears much like the storm above, and the distant explosions by an adversary she wished to gain an equal balance against.  
  
The lost sister was statuesque in gleaming gold, a bare tatter of her tunic dress left hanging strategically against her wet body now reflecting overturned streetlights. Her skin had transformed, the technology inherent in its mimic of gargoyle flesh having metamorphosed in an instinct to protect her from the explosion. And the fall. She barely remembered descending from such a height and pulverizing the pavement beneath her, only waking in a puddle of dirty water with her skin suddenly a deep sunset gold and the texture of smooth steel. The questions she had for such a change, the traumatic scream lodged within her throat wanting release for coming so close to death were pushed back though, behind one consuming consideration, protection, and the chance to revenge herself against a monster she hunted by following his identifiable wake.  
  
It was easy to find him, by his size and the noise his mindless rampage produced, and as the clever sister overturned a small burning vehicle from her path, she stopped suddenly, releasing a golden mane across her brow, emancipated from the tight braid and heavy, each individual hair now a sliver of gilded steel like her skin. He was there, perhaps three hundred yards beyond, her mind measuring the accurate distance within seconds. Set, her would-be murderer cast in sapphire energy, and the hideous destructor raking his hand through another building.  
  
Her mind analytical, she ventured a gaze towards the strange, almost humanoid creature and studied the surroundings, committing instantly to memory every possible chance to stop him, every variable being counted for and running through her foremost thoughts. She took off towards him, gaining speed with every footfall, a silent journey to avoid detection by Set's acute sense of hearing with the large, pointed ears angled to each side, perpetually listening. A flash of gold against the spattering of light and she neared, grasping a discarded electrical wire fallen from the rampage and dragging the heavy corded steel and rubber insulate behind her.  
  
She approached and used her stealth to cross in between his legs, hoping to trip him up using the resilient electrical wire. She looped what slack she had around his left foot, tying it off and using her steel form as an anchor. "I believe the human saying is, the bigger they are..."  
  
Set's curled brow rose when he tried to move forwards and found himself held down in one spot. The sister dug her heels into the pavement, and gritted to hold herself to counter Set's frantic struggle to free himself. The massive creature kicked out of the entrapment swiftly, unbelievably snapping the thick wire clean in half in a shower of sparks from the electrical flow interrupted. She fell backwards, onto her rump, her end of the wire touching to the wetted ground and surging with enough electrical current to feed the entire neighborhood. "...the stronger they become." She rubbed her backside, the pain still evident even without a wound or bruise to show for it on gleaming organic gold and flicked her eyes towards the severed electrical wire. "And here I believed all modern human construction was infallible."  
  
Set turned and spotted her quickly. He was faster than she ever imagined, and as he regained his balance, he stomped his foot to crush the insect that dared stand up against him. It was the sister's speed and agility that kept her alive, as she dodged the foot, the rush of air from the impact pushing her to her knees. She scrambled to evade as Set turned, and another foot hit the ground, sending a tremor rippling the human-altered soils in a concentric ring. She lost her balance, fumbled and slowed, and raised her hands instinctively when a shadow expanded beneath her.  
  
Set brought his foot down to crush the annoyance, and this time, met resistance.  
  
The sister had caught his foot from directly underneath, and used her strength and newfound invulnerability to hold the appendage from completely crushing her. "...not tonight...creature..." Her feet sunk into the pavement against the tremendous pressure, but she held, her mind racing, searching for an escape. It was an inspiration simple enough, as she suddenly rolled out from underneath and allowed Set to strike his foot into the asphalt, devastating the paved pathway. He bellowed, loud, heavy and angered, and drove a fist into the street narrowly missing the sister, and again, the tiny woman escaping the physical translation of his wrath each time.  
  
She was lifted as the sheer force of the blow ripped up an entire piece of the street, and her along with it. Her weight substantially increased by her transformation, she no longer could use the heavy gilded sails to glide, and thus, fell like the proverbial stone and rolled into a storefront. Shaking her head, she turned and found from underneath the tattered awning Set leaning down to finish what he started with his rebirth. "I believe a new strategy is needed."  
  
****************************************  
  
The alarms were a voice unbidden by breath, endlessly screaming within his helmet, telling him, imploring him to get the upper hand against his enemies and fast. Todd could feel every bullet pass along his skin and extremities, the steel skin of his wings being discolored by the blast marks. The Guild still fired, even through the infrequent hiccoughs that turned the world white between the passage of seconds. They had a more immediate goal than having to worry about what could very well be the end of all time, and that was the young man being held in place by the constant gunfire. The one barrier against the detected lifeforms in the hospital ward.  
  
"...stop it..." he whispered inside of his mask, the alarms deafening, overwhelming his resistance and composure, his armor's mindlink setting fire through his nervous system and causing a throbbing pulsation centered on his forehead and the base of his neck where attached the control implants. "Stop it." It was a more forceful command, but lost in the hail of gunfire. It was becoming a blur, the anguished howling of technology, the rattle and clap of guns against titanium hide like a storm contained within his suit, his skin crawling with the sensation of bullets grazing flesh, and Todd could not handle it any longer. "Stop it!" The wings opened up, the razor sharp tips extending from the cradles within the serrated edges of the steel membranes, and exploding outwards towards the Guild. The gunfire stopped, their elusion of the steel flechettes becoming the priority. The wing flechettes sailed past them, breaking up the Guild line and imbedding themselves in the distant wall and elevator doors. "Don't you bastards ever fucking listen?!!" he yelled, the mask translating his young voice as a wintry, metallic growl.  
  
Ignoring what he deemed a mere tantrum, Black threw himself back into the line of fire and opened up with his guns once more, scraping his bullets against the Epsilon's skin. He had heard enough of the excuses thrown to him why the creatures infesting this place and their allies should not die, and the constant sophistry of such heroes' boasts otherwise.  
  
It was almost an audible snap of judgment, as Todd ran towards him, enraged, the war come to his home, the secrets of his family, the pain, the blood and the death far too much for him to handle without releasing it in a surge of raw emotion and fury blinding to the most basic common sense. He swept past the others and collided with Black, lifting the Guild leader from his feet as the Epsilon's boosters powered up, erupting an endless stream of blue-tinged fire from the louvered scoops.  
  
"Stop him!" agent White commanded the others, turning his gun into the thick spiral of rocket exhaust to find his target. The others regained their ground and fired, and only Black's energy shield allowed him to survive the bombardment against the retreating Epsilon, Todd's wild but determined flight taking them both towards the elevator. They met the bombed out entrance and tore through the entire elevator shaft all too effortlessly, and then the wall, shattering steel and concrete and exploding a hole in the side of the Eyrie building, sending debris to spray wildly into the moist air. They emerged outside into the rains, and Todd angled upwards sharply, into the eye of the tempest.  
  
"Damn." White muttered.  
  
Todd risked voyage through an aerial battlefield constant, tiring, deadly, the castle automations waging a war against the two heavily shielded and incredibly armed Guild helicopters. He cared less for the machines and volley of weaponry threatening to destroy both him and the man squirming in his grip, and instead delved deep into the clouds endless and treacherous to navigate. Lightning struck, attracted by the steel alloy and choosing such a target out of predatory instinct, grasping the suit within claws of energy that reflected from his armored hide.  
  
Black could feel the faint charge of electricity curling around his skin through the energy shield, a buffer against the incredible force thrown from the churning mists, but fortunately dissipated by the Epsilon's systems. "Let go of me, traitor!"  
  
Todd chose not to listen. "Shut up."  
  
Black struggled against the young man's grip, hoping each strike from the clouds would not be his last, for a death through recklessness and incineration was not how he envisioned the end of his life. "You'll kill us both!!" Seeing his words again ignored, he took control of such a fate, and planted his gun to the Epsilon's mask, near the temple, unleashing a shot meant to disorient rather than damage, and Todd was both blinded and bewildered. He managed to coerce the armored man towards the ground, his strength augmented by the energy shield, and thus, able to subtly alter the trajectory back through the clouds and towards the castle.  
  
Narrowly missing the castle's southern corner turret and the cannon attached, they skimmed across the rooftops of the main building structure, and skidded to a halt against the stone embankment. Todd shook off the blast taken to the head, and used a wing to ward off Black's ensuing gunfire, the armor-piercing bullets near to gouging even the thick titanium alloy. He leapt towards him, and tackled the Guild leader to the rooftop, where streams of water poured across the slanted structure, making their perch slippery and dangerous. He straddled the fallen Guild member, his silhouette against the streaks of lightning more demonic than any rivaled gargoyle form.  
  
The Epsilon's wing struts released from the bottom a secondary pair of arms, angling forwards to grasp upon a pair of cylindrical objects secured to Todd's shoulder blades. They clasped, and swung the weaponry to each of his forearms, attaching a pair of gatling guns with a shudder and leaving the linked umbilical of bullets leading from both feeds into the ammunition hold on the Epsilon's back. The blades unsheathed from underneath, gleaming in the lightning, and promising a gruesome fate if unleashed into bare flesh. Todd stood over him, hunched, and heaving with every breath. "You want a fight, motherfucker?!!" he screamed, the eyes of the Epsilon burning brightly under the streams of rain pouring from the thick raven shell. "BRING IT!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
A hand without flesh emerged from the smoking pit in the ruined section of Manhattan, a large claw with only a few scraps of regenerating muscle structure stretched across a scorched skeleton to power this husk, charred beyond recognition. It was an excruciating trial, as the remains of Sobek stirred and roused and defied death even as he could not draw breath from lungs that were not there, even as a missing heart could not beat or pump blood through an endless string of arteries and veins burned away. Magic allowed him movement, his bones though scorched protected enough vital tissues to allow the spark of life to remain only just.  
  
He used a single hand to drag himself slowly upwards and out, eyeless sockets unable to see, Sobek guided by feel alone across the scorched terrain. He grasped upon anything he could find to pull his corpse from the pit, dragging his legs yet to be healed and useless, dead weight.  
  
The Goliath creature entered through the flaming wreckage, a reversal of fate delicious to the being fed by hatred. Another blink in time flashed throughout his field of vision, blanketing the entire city, and he did not care otherwise, all that consumed him was the drive, the urge to destroy. It caused conflict with the passenger held within the parcel of power and brute strength, of nobility expunged in favor of raw vengeance. "We once feared you, we once feared even your presence near to us or our family." It watched the burned shell of Sobek continue to languidly crawl from the crater, similar to watching an insect use only the most basic of instinct to skulk their way through an existence all too short and centered on one thing alone, survival. It was amusing. "But stripped of your one deciding advantage, you are nothing. You bark tiresome contentions of world domination like so many psychotics allowed to roam this planet amongst us, you see yourself sitting atop a throne upon a defeated Earth." Goliath walked forwards, and drove his foot into Sobek's ribcage, the immortal rolling away with the brunt of the strike, nearly shredding apart in his fragile state. A few short steps, and Goliath brought his foot down, resting it onto what remained of the Egyptian's neck, the muscular structure almost nearing completion of vocal cords. "We see a sad, delusional creature with a twisted psyche that far outreaches his true capabilities and power. We see yet another adversary testing his limits against us, and proving himself ultimately unable to meet the challenge."  
  
Sobek vomited blood and bile from his internal organs reforming, pouring from the corners of his mouth and staining the ocher bone around his face a muddy red. A hollow laughter bubbled from the opened throat, "...we...shall see..."  
  
It arose into the heavens much like passion and rage made tangible and flesh, the emerald fire bred by lineage ancient and otherworldly now reacting with the pitch of Goliath's dangerously ebbing mood. "Yes, we shall." Energy spilled over the broken edges of the crater, small chunks of debris rose into the air amongst the power so great as to reverse the pull of gravity, and the being formed from the fusion of Goliath and Alexander reveled in the sheath of warm, comforting sorcery. "Perhaps we should split every atom within your body, and force upon you a near infinite amount of controlled nuclear explosions. For we have nothing to curb our darkest impulses save the farthest reaches of Goliath's vast expanse of knowledge." The expenditure of his power was so great as to send ripples across the airwaves and collapse any structure in the vicinity damaged by the gods' rampage, and the rain-soaked chasm of Manhattan lit up in deep bottle green. "Better yet, we will allow those you stole life from to act as our hands, our vengeance." Goliath lifted from the ground and spread his translucent wings to better concentrate, pulling from the wreckage spreading for miles beyond the souls of the lost, their imprint of life left in the throes of such violent death. So powerful, so tortured, they were a weapon within themselves, laughter, anguish, innocence, sloth and greed, the brunt of atrophied emotion left behind acted as a psychic scalpel carving through Sobek's entrails.  
  
Sobek could feel the regenerating meat around his bones being liquefied once more, the tissues in his brain on fire as the electrical synapses increased by a factor of one hundred, harnessing the energy of his thought and sentience into arcs bursting from his skull. Sobek lived a thousand tortures, he was delivered upon by the deaths he had taken a nightmare unlike any other, an amalgamation of voices and screams that exploded his flesh and invaded his very mind. The voices of young and old were deafening, and would drive a lesser being to madness if not already beyond the brink of psychosis.  
  
"Do you feel that?" the fusion of gargoyle and human crowed, his voice the hand of god nearly bursting Sobek's eardrums. "It is OUR power bringing a voice to the dead we now stand on. The horizons of OUR combined imagination, no matter how sinister and repressed and misunderstanding of the energy we wield, are no longer limited by mortal principles or corporeal flesh." Undeniably, with Goliath's sheer intellect and spirit fueled by Alexander's energies, this new form was as near to fay or god as humanly possible, and beyond such ethical quandaries as mercy and compassion when playing with magicks addictive in their might. Humanity was a concept lost in the merging, unless the two consciousnesses, who had seen empires fall and heroes die in their short mortal existences, were to force themselves apart to salvage what they used to be. But it was Goliath's anger that dominated the personality, and what he wanted now more than anything was to commit Sobek to oblivion. "Your game such as it was, ends here, and now."  
  
His hand outstretched, his veins flowing with Avalon enchantments and ready to deliver a final blow, he prepared to separate every molecule and deliver the ensuing energy to the corners of Earth and space and time. But the winged creature hesitated, the hand suddenly shaking. His features contorted, as if a new battle was forged for dominance.  
  
"What?" It was Goliath's voice this time, his tone, his words, his separate mind. "We can destroy him...why do you resist me?!"  
  
****************************************  
  
"You can't kill him, r'member?!" the child screamed against the giant, his voice an echo in this place of private consciousness and sharp perception. "He knows!!"  
  
The gargoyle stared down the boy held an equal distance, growling, angered, frothing at the mouth in his desire to destroy the creature brought to his knees. The very thought of what he could cost Alexander was now distant in the face of unbridled anger, and the fact he so very close to savoring Sobek's demise. "He will die!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
Elisa climbed the wall of debris made slick by the pouring rain, a treacherous hike to find a better vantage point in order to find her husband, the detective drawn by the spire of light rising from the darkened region destroyed by the gods. Her hands were raw, and cut, the tiny streams of blood trailing over copper skin, but she persevered. Another blink in time, and she nearly lost her grip in the sudden flash, and she stopped to rest, wondering just what was causing such chaos. Elisa at last made it to the rubble's peak, and the devastated neighborhoods fell before her eyes from her height atop the building wreckage. The desolation sprawled long before her, wide, a gaping wound in central Manhattan lit by a strange emerald radiance, and she cringed at the damage now fully realized.  
  
She looked below to the focal point of the blinding light, a reactor of sorcery creating swells of energy spreading outwards, and within the epicenter she found her husband as awe-inspiring as a god, and struggling to maintain a precarious grip on a merged consciousness, his face hidden within his hands, and yelling. He was wasting valuable time and energy in his anger against the Egyptian, by the sheer waves of energy pouring from his form and rushing past her, an anxious itch across her exposed skin where the power made contact. She doubted by watching even the most subtle of his movements and gestures his remaining strength, his chest heaving for breath, that this union made possible by magic would not hold his battered body together for long. And she knew, by seeing his wing struts reformed by pure energy bleed from the old wounds, that the merger was not to heal him, only to lay a temporary patch to a much more desperate injury. "Goliath!!" she screamed into the void, hoping to be heard above the great lake of heaven, above the growing screams of the squall made angry by an intrusion into the past. "GOLIATH!!!"  
  
Below, where the gargoyle had ceased his torture upon Sobek to struggle for control against a foe gone unseen, heard the faint cry over the mewled growls rippling across the sky. He looked up into the rain, to see the cloaked silhouette of his mate. "Elisa..."  
  
"Goliath, stop this!!" she yelled to him. "You're using too much energy!!"  
  
"Sobek will die!! And neither you, or the child inside shall stop me!!"  
  
He was running on rage and hatred, and no matter how many times Sobek would heal himself over, she knew her damnably stubborn mate would exhaust all of his newfound energy to search for a method of the Egyptian's destruction, to use Sobek as the focal point for a fury kept inside the last few weeks, and eventually damn his very soul. "He's immortal!!" she screamed back at him, hoping to sway his single-minded quest. "How many times can you burn off his skin before you realize you can't kill him?!!"  
  
Goliath turned back to the writhing creature entrapped within the sphere of his borrowed magic, suffering. "I will find a way."  
  
"NO!!!" This time, it was Alexander's voice, as the battle continued on a field of consciousness. They screamed together in their war for domination, heralding a cry that shattered windows and collapsed entire buildings, and served to dislodge and crumble Elisa's lofty perch.  
  
The pile of wreckage beneath the detective gave way, and she fell within the midst of debris. She had no time to scream, the reaction lost to the rapid speed of her descent, the thunder and lightning, the cracks in time itself, all a detriment to her composure. The jagged ground below loomed fast, and Elisa found herself staring at a spire of steel, inches from piercing her completely. She had stopped in time, with aid from a floating gargoyle and his expanded energy field halting her fatal plunge.  
  
"We have you, Elisa." said the creature of two, using the telekinesis inherent in all magic to carefully, tenderly adjust her pose and carry her towards him. "Do not fear."  
  
Elisa breathed a sigh both of relief and scorn, "I don't fear for my life, Goliath, or whoever the hell is in control of that body...I fear for yours."  
  
He tipped up his chin, glaring down upon her as he held her in an energy-made extension of his opened, flattened palm. "We are fine."  
  
"Then why are you breathing so hard?" she countered, as Goliath now noticed the heavy breaths swirled into the air, his throat dry and rasped. She moved her eyes to where she could see the leaching of blood slowly pouring from where gnarled flesh met emerald energy. "And why is your back bleeding?"  
  
Goliath twitched his brow, and fluttered his new appendages given to him through the merger. In truth, with his adrenaline having calmed, they both felt the drain on the flow of magic once free and unbridled, once so strong as to deceive the users into an artificial divinity. Goliath was exhausted, physically and spiritually, and his gruesome injuries were already gradually bleeding dry the energies Alexander allowed them both.  
  
She knew that expression, of understanding, of remorse and annoyance in the fact she was right. "Goliath, you're hurt, and even with Alex's magic, you can't last for long."  
  
"You are a contradiction." an unexpected answer boomed, an accusation against her, as Goliath merely altered the target of his anger. "You want for a child in a time of death and are angered by our decision otherwise, you wish for justice but remove us from our position as leader to do so." The celestial flames surged, his wings of crystal green engorging in stature and breeding more light, more power, as the anger returned. It seemed godhood did not suit anyone unprepared, even one as noble and righteous as Goliath. "And now you wish for us to stop when we at last have the power to set all things right!"  
  
Elisa lowered a thin brow, noticing her husband's resentment turn completely towards her.  
  
"We are sick of your constant whine, human." he continued, his words dark, his tone damning of his beloved. "We are tired of hearing your selfish, trivial desires day after day when this world descends into chaos because of prejudice and racism!"  
  
"How dare you!" Elisa screamed back against a god taken the handsome form of her husband, unimpressed with any show of power no matter how incredible or impossible it seemed. He was in all things still a mortal wearing the thin veil of virtual godhood, he was her equal, her lover, her strength, but he was not beyond her concerns, and she was not beyond his. "Everything I have done I've done for a damned good reason! You refused to do anything as my colleagues, my friends, were dying!"  
  
"We could not wage a war against an unseen enemy!! We could not risk our clan!"  
  
"Wrong! You were too damned scared to take any action, and you wanted to sit so high in your castle so no one would hurt you, so the world wouldn't touch you!! That wasn't the Goliath I knew and loved and married, it was a shell having succumbed to his own fears! So I voted against you, and only because half the clan actually decided to dethrone you as well, you use me your pressure valve for that anger you constantly carry inside of you!" She ranted higher and stronger than that of the tempest, the rift in their marriage neither closing nor widening, but remaining with their refusal to see the other's argument. "My want for a growing family with you is not trivial! My want to seek justice and stop any more deaths is not selfish!! My right to decide my own fate is not a contradiction, and how dare you condemn me otherwise!!"  
  
Goliath heard all, and felt the air particles quiver with the power behind her breath, the passion, the movement of energy and emotion on many scales, the fire like a substance visible and almost corporeal to his heightened senses. As silence fell between them, as the dance of rain against the shattered ruins of this section of Manhattan created a mournful song, played to a bass of thunder amongst a lower octave. "Have you forgotten so readily that he nearly killed both you and Trinity." Goliath said to remind her, a bitter tone. "He nearly killed our clan, and perhaps thousands have died at his hands..." Goliath clenched his fists. "He took our wings...HE TOOK MY WINGS!!!" The tortured howl erupted far and wide, spreading like an explosion rippling the currents of air and swelling the raindrops.  
  
"I was there!!" Elisa screamed back, the memory horrifying, but fresh, and entrenched into her every waking thought. "I tasted your blood on my lips!! Don't you think I want to see him suffer for that?!!" Through the drops of rain wetting golden skin, her tears were disguised. "But where does vengeance ever end, Goliath?!" she continued, seeing the battle played across his features, the continuing expulsion of Alexander's energy conveying his readiness to try everything at his near-unlimited disposal to destroy Sobek. "How far will your vengeance reach?!! Will it stop with Sobek, or will his death by your hands, and by those of that small, innocent child inside of you only make things worse?! You'll reach so far into the depths of your soul to try to find any way to kill him, and once you overstep those bounds of mortality, of honor and nobility, you might never come back. Death or decadence, take your pick."  
  
****************************************  
  
"She's right." said the child, another voice to help persuade the sheer force of Goliath's will. "You're mad an' hurt an' tired. An' I can't make you better."  
  
"Sobek must suffer!" he growled, his hatred and pain and want for vengeance so great as to make the walls of their shared consciousness tremble, and bleed with rage. They floated in a place without any substance to stand upon or touch, where a misted womb held them in a fluid-like suspension, and the essence of the two rotated around each other, facing one another and squaring off for dominance. "For everything he has done, I will ensure with the last ounce of strength I now possess that this creature is obliterated from existence no matter how severe my injuries!"  
  
"It's my power." Alexander warned possessively with a pointed finger, a voice tinged with bitterness towards the lavender giant, the being he had always revered, perhaps as the truest definition of hero stealing what was rightfully his. "And if you make Sobek die, my mom might die too." The ferocity was displaced by a despondency Goliath could feel within this womb, the child at last acting true to his age and maturity. He could feel his mother's pain right now, the unique bond distressing him, and as such, Goliath could feel that pain as well. "Are you gonna make my mom die?"  
  
****************************************  
  
Her own anger bursting at the seams, Elisa buried her face into her hands, wicking the moisture from her skin, ridding her sight of the intruding strands of raven silk and hoping the cool water across her brow would calm her. "God...how long will this argument last?" she sighed, blaming herself for reacting as she always did, a volcano. "Goliath," she implored to him, "we can scream at each other until we run out of breath, but I think this marriage is strong enough for us to move beyond what we've both done in the past and focus on what must be done now. Neither of us is right or wrong...we only acted in the best interests of our family, friends...and mate. And in the end, neither of us chose the right path." She reached out to him, breaching the gap to make contact from flesh to flesh as she lay her fingers into his palm and reveled in the warmth. "You're right, sometimes I can be a contradiction. I want justice in the midst of chaos, I want life in the midst of death, and I don't want my husband throwing not just his life away by way of revenge, but his very soul."  
  
He bowed his head, deflecting his eyes from hers. "You...are a stubborn woman..." Goliath whispered.  
  
She took the comment as a gracious compliment, and nodded. "I know." Her fingers twined between his, his large and taloned, and their wedding bands matched together, etched gold glinting a deep chartreuse from the reflection of the energy surrounding them. "You need to stop those things tearing apart the city before Alex can't keep you going anymore. Your revenge, your justice, can come later." Her eyes were adamant, and unrelenting as steel, but as always, and only to him, bared openly to her soul. "It has to."  
  
"If you only knew how I felt...if you only knew the pain this," he turned, looking down at Sobek trying if anything to resist the attack of souls against him, "thing has caused me..."  
  
"I see it in your eyes, Goliath, I feel it with every breath you take." She pounded a hand to her chest, his pain hers through the ever-present link between them, no matter how torn or precarious the connection. "Right here. You're exhausted, you're running on hatred and adrenaline and the rush of pure magic." His hand squeezed around hers, a sign of life, and of relent. "You once saved me from running half-cocked against the Guild after the attack on the precinct, now I'm returning the favor. Spare Sobek now, focus the remaining energy you have left in doing what makes you the most noble man on this planet. Protect."  
  
****************************************  
  
He shut his eyes, and kneaded his brow with his hand, allowing serenity to douse somewhat the flames of retribution. He was trembling, and even Alexander could see the muscular structure rippling beneath his skin, as if some great creature writhed beneath to burst out. "P-Protect..." he whispered within the realm of subconscious, Goliath releasing a tear to descend in his fatigue, in his consuming want for a vengeance that went against all he believed in, that threatened to destroy all that he was. "I...I will not endanger your mother any longer, Alexander."  
  
The boy smiled in relief, and the fact Goliath still stood among his chosen heroes. "Elisa says we have to get th' monsters in th' city, but...th' clan..."  
  
"The clan..." he echoed, suddenly realizing what had been transpiring in his absence from the castle. "They...they are under attack by the Guild."  
  
"It was scary." he revealed, from his short time there and the explosions rocking the very foundation of the Eyrie building. "The bad men were hurting the clan. They still are..."  
  
Goliath nodded slowly, exhaustedly, trusting in Alexander's words, a part of him now. "I know. But we must have faith in our clan to persevere, as these gods Sobek unleashed are our more immediate concern."  
  
"I got th' catlady, but th' others are stronger. A lot stronger. I can feel it."  
  
"And through our link, as can I. Sakhmet was the weakest of all of them." Goliath looked keenly towards the boy. "We, or should I say you, have near comparable strength, but our greatest weapon is our intelligence. These creatures act on some sense of primal instinct alone, and thus, are vulnerable."  
  
"An' th' flashes?"  
  
Goliath ground his fanged teeth together, so many attacks at one time, it was hard to choose between all of them. "Beyond our capability to assist." he at last divulged, at a loss to explain or repair the continuing hiccups delivering the world into nothingness for moments at a time.  
  
Alexander hesitated to touch upon this subject once more, but dared, "An'...Sobek?"  
  
****************************************  
  
The Goliath creature turned towards Sobek, almost nearly reformed, but wracked by tortuous sobs as his torment continued, the voices damning and endless and sending a cleansing fire of retribution through every nerve ending. He could light almost all the Western hemisphere with the potent emotional energy roiling his innards. It was pain beyond the limits of any sort of sentient comprehension, a punishment meant for higher beings that played in the milk of galaxies and extinguished stars with but a sharp breath and passing glance. Delivered unto a mortal made timeless by stolen magic, it was ruinous to flesh, but somehow, Sobek remained intact, perhaps his psychosis the ultimate protection.  
  
Elisa was lowered to the ground on a touch of wind and released from the energy field, as Goliath turned all his focus towards the Egyptian. He lowered his face until the stench of decaying skin permeated his senses. "Your existence was spared," they counseled together, Goliath and Alexander speaking as one without conflict to disrupt the delicate mental balance, "your immortality remains a barrier untested for now, and for that, you should be thankful. But soon, you will taste the prospect of death, and in that fact, you should fear."  
  
"...spare me...such inanity..." Sobek hissed, his words lost in the metallic crimson coating his teeth. "...your world...will soon cry, bleed...and vanish..." Sobek was himself testing the limits of this creature, wanting for the release of Goliath's darkest whims. "...kill me, Goliath..." he spurred the wrath once more, he tested the flames to see how much of the leader's soul he could take. "...let loose all you have burning within...you are more a god than the creatures I released...prove your superiority to all...your divinity..." He saw Goliath's eyes twitch. "...kill me..."  
  
"Goliath, he's goading you." Elisa warned, trying to be the voice he would heed. "He wants you to use everything you have, to exhaust yourself to the brink of death. He wants your soul more than anything, even if it means he dies."  
  
"Our soul is already owned, Sobek, by a band of gold and silver." Goliath raised his hand, and the ground trembled. From the very center of the crater erupted a massive chunk of bedrock raised from the depths beneath the city. A distant building's ruins collapsed, when four large girders were pulled from the gutted skeleton and levitated towards the lavender gargoyle. Goliath clenched his hand and the floating girders twisted on one end, becoming spears with the tips razor-sharp. "You will be dealt with, monster, after we remove your fabricated spawn from our protectorate." Goliath waved his hand, and Sobek impacted against the bedrock slab, an impression of his form made from the power of the blow. He commanded the girders to impale the immortal in gruesome if not deliberate points. Through his palms, and both his ankles together, and a final girder through the upper chest, Sobek was mercilessly crucified. "Stay here. We will return."  
  
He knew of the spectacle he had become, he knew the religious importance and dependence the humans placed on the image he mimicked, and Sobek screamed in the pain, the entrapment, and the mortification. He struggled against his bonds, but could not budge the girders having secured him to the bedrock. He was imprisoned, and only by Goliath's will would he be allowed freedom.  
  
Goliath turned to Elisa, standing within the mists of Alexander's borrowed magic. She turned her eyes from Sobek to the majesty that was her husband. "Elisa..."  
  
She held up her hand to deflect any apology, or any speech he may hold. "Alex's power, Goliath's will. A dangerous mix if I ever saw one." Her hand instead drew a line towards where the city was under attack, where a disconcerting darkness reigned in a metropolis of light and color. "The airforce is down, Goliath, every plane and chopper in the area has been taken out, and I'm sure any more will meet the same fate. That leaves you. Both of you."  
  
Another cosmic blink, and Elisa faded momentarily. Goliath grabbed for her hand to reassure she was still existent. "Time is under attack."  
  
"I don't know what these burps in ivory white are, Big Guy, but right now, right here, people are dying...and as this world descends into chaos as you so elegantly stated, we need a hero." She smiled a wonderful smile. "We need YOU."  
  
"No more shall die then." Pulling Elisa's hand to his lips, he tasted strength and passion in tawny warmth much like the glisten of copper under the pouring rain. It was delicious, and scented of jasmine and chamomile cream, even with the cascading beads of rain. "We would perhaps do more, but we have an impressionable child watching our every move."  
  
The smile widened. "You've always been my favorite hero."  
  
"Come." He lifted her, the energy he expended reigned in to become a more compact shield around him, conserved for the coming battle, and Goliath swept open his wings to raise them both into the sky and onto their destination. Unwilling to let her from his sight any longer, she would join him on his exodus. "We shall protect."  
  
"I'm...I'm going to see if I can get through to the clan." Elisa commented, as the city drowned below them in darkness and devastation. "I've been having trouble reaching them."  
  
****************************************  
  
His armor hailed a garbled call on a channel private, and known only to a select few graced with the devices tied together by a global string. Through the static of the Guild jamming frequency effectively cutting off almost all communications, came the fragments of Elisa's voice bursting melodically through the white noise. Xanatos cocked his head, using the filters to better clear the detective's voice.  
  
"...zzzzzzzzare youzzzthere......zzzzz...zzzz anyone zzzlistening?..."  
  
Indeed, did the billionaire concentrate between the battle to pick the splinters of Elisa's message from the roaring static.  
  
"...zzzzzzzblinkszzzz...like the worldzzzzzis hiccuppingzzzzz..." the message continued. "...what'zzzzzzzhappening?..."  
  
It was hard to discern the message, but it seemed wherever Elisa was, she had noticed the same cosmic blinks the clan did.  
  
"...zzzzliath...andzzzzzzzsobek..."  
  
Xanatos jerked back when at last hearing what he had waited for so long, but at the most inconvenient of times when buried shoulder-deep in Guild members trying to peel the armor from his body. A quick swipe of his hands relieved his body of the intruders like tenpins, his martial arts skills translated near flawlessly, and a rake of the stones in front of him with the forearm-mounted lasers scared off those who dared mar his sterling finish with their weapons. "My apologies." he called to the clan. "I'm needed elsewhere."  
  
Lexington noticed the billionaire power the boosters on his armor's back, exploding from the crowd. "Xanatos?!" he yelled out after the retreating shape lost in the chaos just above, as Xanatos fled with but an elusive explanation and disappeared into where the storms were strongest. "Where are you going?! XANATOS!!!" Another ally lost to circumstance, leaving the dwindled contingent a harder task with one more gone, and many more Guild to come.  
  
****************************************  
  
And now deprived of their leader, White had stepped up to lead the charge towards the hospital, the entrance left unguarded by Todd's sudden departure and ripe for their conquest by the smaller contingent having invaded into the deepest reaches of the Eyrie. The pointman entered in first, sweeping the targeting laser throughout the darkened infirmary with the beds emptied of their patients. As the others filtered into the room, he tested the sheets with his infrared scanner, drifting his hand across the impression of warmth left from Maria's presence. Where previously scanned by infrared, the heat signatures in humanoid shape had vanished, and the rooms on either side of the hospital suite were concealed from his intruding sight enhanced by the best of technology. "Thermograph is dark. They're gone."  
  
"No," White would not believe it, "they're not." With a silent gesture, he moved his team towards the surgical bay door, where indeed the walls were shielded on all sides to protect the patients undergoing surgery from any intruder, whether flesh or germ, malicious or not.  
  
The pointman moved towards the opposite doorway, watching intently for any swirl of color to warn him of a presence, and a potential target. The door was left slightly ajar, allowing a slim crack of color to invade his infrared besides the dark gray signifying heavy shielding within this opposite room as well. Using his free hand, he opened the door only to have a long, sterling barrel fall into place between his eyes, and he nearly soiled his suit in fear when the sudden shock erased the fact he wore a near-impenetrable energy field.  
  
"Hi there." Iliana cooed, and pulled the trigger. The Magnum .45 barked fire and smoke, and ricocheted a bullet from the pointman's shield with a metallic shriek. Her injuries still not fully healed, the sheer kick of the oversized weapon pushed her weakened form back into Delilah's arms, as the Guild member suffered far worse, being lifted from his feet and thrown to the floor by the impact. The others turned around to see a massive beast spill from its confinement, as Bronx emerged, a hellhound bent on feeding and appearing as more a nightmare than these men have ever seen. He latched on to the first soldier, his jaws clamping down on the man's shielded arm. Delilah and Hudson followed, attacking between the shaken aim of bullets and energy beams, their screams creating fear and panic in such closed quarters. The echo was raucous, and nerve-wracking, and the gargoyles used their advantage to attack before the Guild had the chance to steady their aim.  
  
Hudson swiped with his sword, reflecting any stray energy beam away and slashing against his chosen opponent's shield, forging from his blade a long stream of sparks bred against the friction of steel on a compressed layer of energy. Delilah fell behind him, facing down agent White and holding to his weapon, a deadly struggle for dominance. The clone snarled against the lanky, masked human, vying for triumph against a hideous creature whose eyes burned a demonic red.  
  
"Winged bitch!!" he sneered with contempt, as they played around each other, crushing the surrounding hospital equipment to wrest the weapon from the other's hand. "Someone shoot her!!"  
  
The pointman grappled in his rise from the floor, his ears bleeding, the bullet having done perhaps more damage than he thought possible. Groggy, he aimed towards White and Delilah, and held his targeting laser until his shot would clear as the gargoyle's back was forcefully turned against him. His eyes blurred, his head ringing incessantly, he pulled the trigger. Whether or not the bullet found its mark was inconsequential, as Nudnik, once contained from the fight by the twins, now roared into battle and rammed his head into the pointman's back. Together they flew across the hospital floor and into the surgical bay door, breaking the seal and emerging directly into surgery.  
  
Both Annika and Pierce lifted from an anesthetized Rose, to see the Guild member stare blankly back at them. He raised his gun.  
  
****************************************  
  
Sata brought her sword handle up underneath her attacker's chin, a strike efficient and fast, but non-lethal to spare the progenitors of her new clan a death before their fated time, and thus, wreck the timeline further by tugging a needed thread out of arrangement. One against fifteen, the hunting party having returned to find her within their home and dripping with blood not her own was surrounding her, readying to subdue her.  
  
Othello she knew, and regarded cautiously, the hunter eying her beneath a viciously curved browridge, such a change from the tightly wound but honorable brethren who shared her home. The others were unknowns, unpredictable in all but one premise, they would defend their home and clan at all costs. Othello then swiped, and she evaded, forcing her blade handle into a female's stomach who took the opportunity when the intruder was distracted. Two down, and Sata whirled with blade drawn towards the others, a full circle used to ward them off and away from the stairwell.  
  
A larger one attacked with his massive body used as a weapon with no defense, until Sata leaned back and tripped him, ending his threat quickly. She was caught from behind, her arms held motionless and her sword deprived, the one equalizer taken by brute strength far surpassing her own. She struggled, and managed to swerve her captor around, her raised feet touching to the wall. "Let...me...go!" she snarled, using the wall to push herself up and over the Wyvern gargoyle. She jabbed her knee directly between his wings, and he cried out in pain as a streak of fire traveled the length of his back.  
  
Sata turned in the ferocity of battle to unleash her fist into another attacker as a pair of hands clenched into her kimono, and suddenly drew to a stop, a young, crimson gargoyle appearing in her line of sight. "Oh," from the rookery perhaps, to explore the commotion outside with an eternal thirst for a thrill, and join into the fray without fear of reprisal, "dear." It was Brooklyn, the younger version, now staring at this matronly gargess with all the awe and sexual attraction a young, hormonally charged adolescent would. The juxtaposition was unsettling, and Sata creased her brow, and then swung her arm into the side of Brooklyn's neck, effectively, gently, knocking him unconscious. "That is for being stubborn a thousand years from now."  
  
****************************************  
  
He was in the clear of the expansive courtyard, empty and abandoned, with shadows looming across the medieval architecture and brought to life through the flickering torchlight, an existence bred to frolic measured in the waning hours of the night. Broadway could hear above him the struggle, where time itself was being slowly pulled apart as Demona ravaged her younger self, hoping to destroy everything she loathed, and all he ever knew.  
  
Racing for the entrance to Goliath's turret where the stone tower met the courtyard level, he thought only of Angela, and suppressed the urge to liberate his lunch to the stones below in the fact his heart waged a war against his mind. To stop Demona would set things right, and condemn him to an existence right, but achingly alone. To allow her to kill her past self would ease the pain he felt, and reunite him with the woman who made him entirely whole in either life, or death. But seeing his hand phase from reality once again made adamant his decision, and his tread not once slowed towards the turret mouth, where a torch-lit stairway spiraled upwards into the celestial yawn of starlight.  
  
Thunder rolled against the parapets, and Broadway had to re-examine the familiar sound underneath an impressively clear sky. The thunder had come alive, the storm he thought he had left behind in the future had simply taken a new, more dangerous form winged and implacable. A shadow crossed above him, far darker than any that lay across the short distance to the turret entrance. Broadway looked up, only to be consumed within that darkness breached by two, white glowing eyes that burned brighter than any star. "I don't need this right now..."  
  
Goliath had risen. And his anger matched that of his future counterpart, in being toppled by some contorted creation as his mate's very life may hang in the balance. He had leapt towards the intruder, and swept the force of the winds themselves against Broadway's chest. Blinding pain erupted through the younger gargoyle, as Goliath unleashed a well-placed fist into his chest, nearly caving in his ribcage. "I do not know what sorcery created you, imposter," the Wyvern leader howled, "but if your attempt to kill my mate succeeds, I will ensure you will never again see the moon rise!!"  
  
Broadway struggled against a creature whose strength increased in correlation to his anger, outmatched in utter ferocity and strength. "I'm not trying to kill your mate, I'm trying to save her!!"  
  
"Then why does she scream so?!" he yelled back as they grappled fist to fist, the leader impressed by this reproduction's brute strength. "Why is her voice tortured?!"  
  
"That's not her..." he answered, only serving to make his argument weaker by a bizarre contention.  
  
"You weave impressive lies!" Goliath flipped Broadway up and over him, throwing the younger gargoyle down to the stones, with enough power erupting from the physical blow to send a shiver through the entire courtyard. "You are some forgery crafted by the foul stench of sorcery, and not the young gargoyle that I am often forced to send to the rookery!"  
  
Broadway shook off the strike from his body, shaking his head to clear his vision and fight back. "No, I'm not...not anymore..." He drove a knee into Goliath's midsection, without a care of the effects such a blow would have on this timeline's version of the Wyvern leader and his reputable temper. "I already told you, I...grew...UP!!!" His fist came like a strike of lightning and all of its awesome power, connecting squarely to Goliath's face and knocking the lavender giant backwards. Momentarily freed from the tempest that was Goliath, he started for the turret once more, leaving behind him a being relentless in his protection of his loved ones. He met the entrance and started quickly the steep climb to the top.  
  
Blood coursing into his eyes, from the gash left by Broadway's fist and separating over the bridge of his nose to mark the dark crevasses of his face, Goliath snorted a spray of breath, seeing red, and flipped to his feet. He ran towards the intruder, seeing a flash of aquamarine skin through the small lanceted portal on the turret. His aim was precise as he launched seven hundred pounds of fury into the air, blind anger directing every action, and plowed through the turret wall, exploding methodically placed stone and catching Broadway unawares as he ascended the staircase. The force behind his flight coupled with their great weight inadvertently acted more as a battering ram, the gargoyles crashing clean through the other side of the turret. The entire structure weakened, it wavered, broke midway through and collapsed in a plume of dust, bringing the entire burden of the tower down upon the castle in a rain of stone.  
  
****************************************  
  
The tower's pinnacle shuddered with the devastating loss of stability, and leaned, and Demona halted her fatal assault against her younger self, the counterpart bloodied and near death. A convulsion of stone, a tearing of support structures and the entire turret crumbled beneath them both. They fell, the future Demona trying if anything to stay near her target between the fragmented stones and choking smoke as they plummeted. She screamed, long and loud and endlessly vengeful, as they were parted, their forms enveloped, and into the explosion of the collapsed turret swallowing the courtyard whole.  
  
****************************************  
  
As if in perfect time with the outburst a thousand years from now, fire erupted within the billows above the displaced castle dark and all foreboding, and the Guild helicopter designated Echo Two suddenly ruptured from the damage taken to the shield by the Steel Clan. The generator had overloaded and spilled from the craft's side a stream of fuel and a trail of sparks between the riveted plates of steel armor. More Cyber-Biotics drones fired as they encircled the damaged vehicle, taxing the shield to its very limits. The shield blurred and erupted, as the helicopter's fuselage burst from the side in a tendril of flame, depriving it of the greatest equalizer. The energy field dissipated outwards, an expulsion of the remnants of energy, and eventually faded away, leaving the sheen of bare, unprotected steel.  
  
"The shield is down!" Desdemona yelled out in a jubilation barely restrained, at last an advantage in their favor.  
  
"SHOOT IT!!!" Lexington screamed towards Mother's holographic form, a warning loud, desperate and screeching.  
  
Swerving her form towards the helicopter, the light-bred apparition of Goliath's mother knitted her brow in seeing the advantage open up, and all available cannons turned towards the aircraft struggling to maintain itself within the air. The cannons fired onto a singular target, razing against the side and undercarriage, the pilot pulling up to just evade the fire launched from the castle's spires. With her insistent programming leading her to kill against her wishes and the direct orders given, Mother commanded all available Steel Clan robots to hurl themselves against the helicopter, using their bodies as ammunition in a desperate time, a kamikaze of hundreds of pounds of titanium alloy and weighted bulk slamming against the Guild craft.  
  
It could no longer handle the severe punishment thrown against the armored carriage, and the massive amounts of ammunition and equipment aboard were to be its greatest downfall. The helicopter expanded outwards into a ball of flame and shrapnel and searing fire, like a star being born underneath the layers of atmosphere. A deep ruby red became the sky, amongst the steel billows of a dangerously swelling storm and raining debris down upon the parapets of the castle and the towers of the city below.  
  
"Enjoy the trip, bastards!!" Lex cheered, as the helicopter's blazing ruins fell from the sky leaving behind a trial of oily smoke, a descent of more than two thousand feet unto the empty street below. "It's a long way down..."  
  
****************************************  
  
His hand unleashed into the storefront where the clever sister had taken refuge, and she barely moved from the way as the entire building's antiquated fascia of curved brick was scraped away by a single swipe. The sister used her speed to dodge the coming blows as Set pounded into the pavement only inches from where she once stood. Constantly moving, she stood a slim chance, her mind racing for a solution as the predator sunk his large clawed hands into the pavement with the most deadly of intentions.  
  
She needed an equalizer, she needed to bring him down to her level to better fight this creature, and seeing the physical sophistication of Set's energy-bound form, an idea suddenly struck through her technologically enhanced mind. Running from him, she aimed towards another building, where yet destroyed fell its tall windowed front, displayed of jewelry and gold and pearl behind the tempered glass, thousands of dollars of merchandise left behind when the employees fled for their lives. It did not concern her. The sister brandished an elbow, using a single blow to shatter the glass with her molten skin, the tensile strength of steel easily breaking through the near bulletproof substance. A large triangular shard, virtually as high as she stood, glistened brighter than the rest. Seeing Set's reflection behind her within the fragment, she grabbed the shard and wrenched it from the frame.  
  
Set attacked, narrowly missing the gilded gargoyle and instead scooping out a portion of the street as if warmed butter, the determent of asphalt and steel nothing to him and his size, his density. He pulled his hand from the sidewalk and street, dragging out a few electrical and phone wires having tangled around his claws, and turned around to locate the annoyance having eluded him.  
  
"That's it..." she whispered to none but herself. "Search for me." The sister dodged skillfully between the wreckage and debris, brandishing the glass shard in her small hands. "Try to find me, let your eyes roam the wrong way." Set looked around him, and concentrated on his environment, rather than his own body, exactly what the clever sister had hoped. She appeared from behind him, having circumnavigated around him to appear just near his left leg, the arched heel's structure making the leg dependant on the bulging rear tendons. Before Set could detect her approach, she jumped towards him, and sliced the shard through the back of Set's ankle, breaking the near-impervious membrane of his skin with a swift attack. "Achilles tendon." she announced clearly, her voice becoming slightly cold, mechanical as she ran the shard through the sapphire energy mimicking flesh, severing the ligament completely. "If severed entirely at the correct point, the entire leg becomes nearly useless." Spouting procedural jargon, she ran off to a safe distance, her assault done, having wielded her knowledge as a formidable weapon. "Balance now compromised by rendering ability to equalize oneself useless."  
  
Set screamed in pain, and wobbled, favoring the wounded leg and swaying from side to side without the proper equilibrium.  
  
"Subject will undoubtedly fall with such height under the pressure of such powerful gravity."  
  
It seemed as if the street gave out beneath him, but it was in fact his wounded, useless leg that collapsed from the weight of compressed energy. Set fell, languidly, drawn out, the impact against the broken street a loud, audible, echoing clap.  
  
The lost sister smiled underneath the golden sheath of skin. "Isn't science wonderful?"  
  
Set howled, and tried to right himself with a leg made useless, the energy lethargic in knitting the layers of charged molecules together. He hobbled, hunched and wounded, breeding an odd, piercing squeal eventually exploding into a full scream of rage. The sister gave no quarter, knowing the energy would weave itself back together soon enough, and Set would be mobile, and the Egyptian god of anger would be furious beyond imagining. Sprinting across the street, she aimed for the fallen powerline, still channeling the electrical current into a bleed of sparks bubbling the pools of rainwater. She grabbed it, without fear of harm in her steel form and turned around only to be grasped within a massive fist.  
  
Set had reached out and snatched her, the sister being crushed within his palm by the rabid deity crawling across the ground. "...ungh..." Under incredible pressure, the sister grunted, her lungs compressed and her internal structures being compacted. "...energy dispersal...needed..." she managed, as Set hoped to squash the little insect, grinding steel bones to powder. She kept her grip strong on the live powerline, and readied a desperate plan. Jabbing the line into his hand, he released her when the pain of the electrical current registered. He pulled away in instinct, and the clever sister dropped to the ground, stumbled, caught her breath and charged towards him. Leaping onto the fallen beast's chest, she stabbed the powerline into the churning layer of simulated skin. "The city shall revenge."  
  
The electricity surged through him, enough energy to feed the entire city block channeling through his form, breeding a scream excruciating to her ears. The sister took the brunt of the energy as well, enveloping her skin, and trying if anything to find a weakness to exploit on a flawless, silky curvature of evolution's greatest living masterpiece. Her transformation held as did she, the technology inherent within her very cells keeping the destructive forces of electricity from burning her alive. She kept the wire lodged into his chest by any means, engulfed wholly within the electrical current.  
  
Set's form bulged hideously, the energy mixing, growing, swelling to a breaking point, as every building and lamppost in the vicinity dimmed or burst, the power stolen and redirected. The creature squalled in pain, the shell holding back the energy of his rebirth from spilling back into the world cracking, serrated lines drawing themselves over his writhing structure, until abruptly, it burst.  
  
And Set exploded. The energy that created him, gave birth to him, and nurtured his rampage, suddenly erupted when released from their bonds. The magical contour and appearance granted by the Egyptian orbs and the one lasting relic of the true Set that modeled his form were obliterated by the overload of power. It was a ripple in a massive pond, the excess energy inflating across the ground in a perfect circle, sweeping debris and broken husks of cars in its wake and acting more like a tidal wave slamming against the gutted buildings. The great sound of a dying wail tapered off, the light extinguished as the energy bled away into the atmosphere, leaving only the darkened street and the glow of raindrops spattering against torn asphalt.  
  
And within the scorched epicenter, stood the lost sister, her golden skin scalding to the touch and steaming. She appeared stunned, perhaps surprised by her survival. She coughed a small puff of smoke, and then screamed, releasing the shaken rage and panic, the fear and anger, all in one consuming shriek. It soon trailed off, and the stood silently, the falling rain cooling her superheated coating. "Well," she gasped, "that was...invigorating." She looked around her, the smoke rising from the seared pavement tinged a light sapphire and glittering with the lasting remnants of Set's energy, the only light in a desolate neighborhood. "It seems...I won."  
  
A girder snapped a few meters away from her, the foundation of a taller building giving way from the damage taken from the explosion, and it toppled from the bottom up. The sister, weakened by the ordeal, looked up, and the enormous building fell, collapsing directly on top of her.  
  
****************************************  
  
Her husband shuddered, and she could see the ripple passing through his skin, but not from the blinks in time, but a deeper feeling that touched his soul. "Goliath?" Elisa asked from her place in the sky beside her lover, held by a gentle touch of magic as they flew just between the building rooftops. "What is it?"  
  
Their eyes roamed the broken city, a feeling, an impression distant and nearly recognizable to make the lavender giant slow in his flight. "We thought we sensed something...familiar..." The winged creature looked in the direction where his sister had destroyed Set, only to be buried by the destruction wrought by the god's rampage, but shook off the pretense and focused on his goal as they approached the outer edge of the destruction. Goliath suddenly angled sharply towards the ground, a change in direction abrupt enough to make Elisa gasp and hold to her stomach in the rapid descent.  
  
Debris, he had spotted it from far above with his keen eyes made astonishing by the boost of magic, and Elisa forcefully clenched her jaw in seeing the ruins of aircraft littered across the ground, a graveyard for the brave and foolish, having dared to test their technology against magic. The helicopters and airplanes scattered across the ruined section of Manhattan, army issue and Guild tech like broken toys abandoned by their master and left to rust within the empty streets. "Are they..."  
  
"Dead." he answered, his senses unable to unearth any semblance of life within the jagged pieces of steel and desiccated flesh, a twisted mess where discerning human from metal was a near-impossible task. "All of them. There is nothing we can do."  
  
"Jesus..." she mourned, moving the sodden tendrils from her eyes as Goliath slowly hovered across the remains. "All these people..."  
  
"Will be avenged." Goliath finished, his voice dominant over Alexander's. Elisa felt the fiery exoskeleton of magic convulse and shift, and she was halted in mid-air. Goliath waved his hand, and rid himself of her presence, she being a liability he could not afford to lose. "You will be safe somewhere else."  
  
Elisa rose quickly upwards on a tendril of emerald green, over the rooftops, and to a higher building far and yet untouched. "Goliath?" she questioned, but when landing, when approaching the building's edge to peer into the city, she knew why he had so brusquely pushed her away. He had found them, the deities hungry for consumption and ruin, led by one instinct alone, and Elisa lay her own eyes upon them for truly the first time, her breath stolen by their macabre glory, morbid in its power to hold steady her yawning gaze. The extent of the devastation they caused was unimaginable, and by Elisa's best guess it had surpassed millions of dollars, an entire chunk of city torn away and by her vantage point, the lights of Manhattan had been extinguished like some great, dark chasm. She shivered. "Be careful, Big Guy."  
  
****************************************  
  
Apep heaved his long tail through a building, cleaving the structure in half and falling tons of steel and iron, the great serpent a sole destructive force, so large, and so very quick. The snake searched through the spires, wanting more playthings like the flying machines that had lay their vicious sting to his hide, and it darted back and forth, lunging its gaping jaw into the crumbled buildings and nipping quickly to dislodge any potential meal.  
  
Septu, the Egyptian warrior and the god of war, Menhit, the lioness and the goddess of destruction, each wandered on a separate path gutting emptied buildings and forging three distinct paths from an epicenter wide and devastated. If left for long enough, they would exhaust themselves perhaps of their given energy, but not without reducing the entire island of Manhattan, and perhaps the entire city on the mainland to utter ruin. The cracks floating through the timeline as visible, perceivable interruptions had no effect on their rampage, without the capacity to understand such vehement fissures strung throughout.  
  
And above, feeling the hiccups in reality pass through his skin with Alexander's finely tuned magical senses, a sense of urgency with each snapped strand of yet another timeline, Goliath suddenly plunged into the fray, his boldness met with power bursting from his skin. Like the frequent thrusts of lightning, he dropped directly onto Septu, toppling the enormous, humanoid energy-amalgamation by shredding his exoskeleton talons into the counterfeit god's backside. "Scream, god," they chided with a snarl, "let us hear the tortured cry of false divinity." Septu bellowed and staggered, the fires of escaping energy bleeding from his back, and he fell away, only to reveal Goliath to Menhit.  
  
The lioness licked her lips in seeing fresh prey, a moving target with the audacity to fight back, and she could not readily resist the primal challenge. She leapt forwards, and swiped at Goliath, who dodged her deadly claws shearing through the energy field surrounding him. He turned and found the lioness upon him quickly, mouse to her cat, and on the receiving end of a wide paw.  
  
He ended up against a skeleton of severed girders, and cleared his vision quickly enough to avoid losing his very head as Menhit attacked with no quarter, striking sharpened claws of energy across his chest. He stunned the beast by blasting against her chest a beam of energy and rolled between her fore legs to end up underneath. He struck lightning quick and thunder hard to her belly, uprooting the cat and knocking her over. She rolled, he followed, they danced anew, equal in strength and agility they traded talons to each other's flesh. One particular swipe proved nasty, and Goliath cringed at the wound, and snorted. "Enough of this." He unleashed another beam towards her, an unyielding sum, knocking the animal clean away and into a building, the lioness' durable, sapphire shell exploding clean through the battle-damaged spire. It shuddered on its last legs and collapsed with the requisite support structures completely severed, and Goliath watched the creature disappear into a plume of smoke and debris.  
  
A massive set of jaws suddenly enclosed around him, surprising the gargoyle human merge with such speed. Apep clenched its jaws into Goliath's body and pressed the two massive fangs against his stomach and neck, compressing flesh with the pressure to shatter steel. "...ungh..." As Elisa watched fearfully from above, Apep lifted Goliath into the air, strutting the gargoyle as a prize taken by force and violently shaking the helpless being in its mouth back and forth. Unable to puncture the exoskeleton of magical energy wrapped around the lavender gargoyle, Apep threw him towards another building, the speed creating a projectile from the gargoyle's density, and Goliath crumpled the entire southern wall. It folded in on itself, burying the hero beneath gallant principles that fell short and several tons of steel and brick.  
  
"Goliath!!" Elisa screamed from above, her voice all but drowned in the storms, and all but lost in the chaos of the battle.  
  
A portion of toppled building exploded outwards, as the gargoyle fought his way from the wreckage, perhaps more angered than injured, and used the mighty limbs to knock any piece of debris away no matter how heavy or thick. He licked the trickle of blood from the corner of mouth as the great snake snapped forwards, curling the bulk of its long, serpentine form around the edges of the rubble where Goliath stood. "Your master will not prevail..."  
  
The serpent's head wavered back and forth, a wary stance of a predator locking eyes with its prey, and abruptly lunged forwards again, opening his jaw to completely devour the gargoyle whole and swallow into its belly.  
  
****************************************  
  
Another disruption in reality played havoc with his suit's systems, a blink wiping away even the memory of such impressive technology for a moment in time, and then, returning the flow to normal. Xanatos angled towards where the homing beacon had traced Elisa's last known position, his gifts of the commlinks having come with a price, a tracker in each tying them all to the threads on his fingers like marionettes, a fallback among many, the billionaire meticulous, almost compulsive, in his preparation for all contingencies.  
  
From his vantage, he could see firsthand the startling scale of damage done to his city, extending in a radius nearly a mile wide, and he cursed beneath his mask the master of these creatures tearing up the island city. He descended in the darkness, a quiet chasm of devastation, having followed the homing beacon's trace that abruptly ended here. Why he did not know, and unbeknownst to him, it was the energy field of his own son that disrupted the beacon's steady signal, and that disguised Elisa's path taken with the fusion of her husband and the billionaire's only offspring. He trawled through the debris, cautious in his step to avoid any sort of detection from his allies staunch in their trust of him, and perhaps foolish.  
  
He emerged from the wreckage and onto the periphery of the crater left from a fiery tumble from the heavens, and found vindication at the sight of a gruesome crucifixion. "Isn't this amusing?" he crowed smoothly, his voice like silk and his eyes containing a rare moment of enjoyment in a time of battle and a threat to all reality. It was a little bit of validity in seeing Sobek skewered to a raised chunk of bedrock, and helpless. And so, it was a slow, deliberate gait, to fully relish the view of the immortal strung up by girders pierced through his hands and legs and chest, and soaked by the pouring rain. He eventually stood directly beneath him, hands nonchalantly held behind his back and watching for any signs of life.  
  
Sobek stirred, and growled at his audience.  
  
"How the mighty have fallen."  
  
The Egyptian struggled at his bonds, and glared from beneath a jagged brow of exposed bone.  
  
"I'm lucky not to have been disemboweled after I disabled the Eyrie's defensive shield." Xanatos revealed, as Sobek perked up. "One would think my business partner would arrive on time when I provide a suitable window of opportunity. The Guild's dismantling of my home would have made perfect cover." Xanatos raised his arms, baring the lasers from his forearms and aiming them at Sobek. "Where the hell have you been?"  
  
Sobek could only smile in the fun he had shared with Goliath, an intricate revenge only barely sated, and only barely begun. "...playing..."  
  
"Your little amusement has placed a rather large hole in this city, and killed hundreds if not thousands of people!"  
  
"...I fail...to see your point..."  
  
"You are truly a detestable creature." His mask's visor located the precise locations on where to fire, Goliath's crucifix a pleasurable piece of work in its impenetrable simplicity. "This may sting." he warned, as the streams erupted crimson from the barrels, compressed energy biting into flesh. Xanatos aimed strategically with full power channeled through his lasers, cutting loose Sobek from his bonds by liquefying the skin pierced by the girders, without a care for the tremendous pain caused by his heartless act. Sobek's extremities having caught fire and completely burned away, he had almost freed the immortal, hanging limply by the single, larger girder impaled through his chest. A lone blast exploded the flesh from around the steel construction implement, and Sobek fell to the ground, a cavernous hole in his torso and his arms and legs horribly burned and forcefully amputated.  
  
The lapping flames being slowly doused from the rain, Sobek coughed, the cavity reforming lungs to breathe, and pulled the bloody stumps that used to be his hands to his chest. He raised his eyes to the billionaire, who merely stowed his weapons and hesitantly, vigilantly, offered a hand to the handless. A cruel joke indeed.  
  
"If you're at last finished playing around," said Xanatos calmly, staring down the mutated creature smelling of decay, who smiled back, "we have a deal to discuss."  
  
****************************************  
  
His vision severely smeared by Iliana's Magnum and the shot taken point blank to the head, the Guild pointman saw only the blurred image of Annika's wings protruding from her surgical gown, a rich blush against the sterility of the surgical bay. It was enough. He razed a trembled blast across the operating table with his damaged aim, directly between Dr. Pierce and Annika and inches from Rose's lifeless body. Pierce immediately draped himself over Rose, her stomach left open and bleeding onto his gloved hands, as Annika moved away and intentionally became the target to lead the Guild member's aim away from her patient, and revealed mother-in-law.  
  
"Bastard!" she snarled, slamming him up against the wall to relieve him of his gun. But the shield held against her fists, drenched in Rose's blood and leaving pale streaks of amethyst across the layering of energy as she tried in vain to inflict any damage. Her hand wrapped around his wrist, his gun flooded wildly into the surgical bay, spreading fire into the sterile chamber. "Don't you care about the woman lying on that table dying?!" she hissed through the thick material of her surgical mask.  
  
"If she's your ally," the pointman responded blandly, "then she's our enemy."  
  
"Like I've never heard that before."  
  
"Damnit..." Pierce muttered, forced to continue the operation lest Rose bleed to death under the care of his scalpel. Single-handedly, as Annika and the Guild member struggled around him, fighting with equal strength through evolution and technology, he pieced together the nun's ruptured insides, using all of his skills to make a blur of his hands. They pushed against him in their dance of death, and he nearly severed a vital artery. "Damnit..." He grabbed a clamp and used the suction tube to clear his way through the labyrinth of entrails, as the constant monitor once pulsing with a steady beat grew dangerously erratic, threatened by a reckless barrage of gunfire. "Annika, get him out of here!!"  
  
"I'm trying!!" Annika screamed, her concern gallantly misplaced, for her patient and not for herself. He was strong, with the shield acting as an exoskeleton he overpowered her against the far wall, using his leverage to slowly lower the gun barrel towards her masked face.  
  
****************************************  
  
An odd couple, now brought together in the midst of battle, both Delilah and Iliana handled another Guild member, hearing the desperate cry erupt from the open door to the surgical bay. Where one would distract and lure his attack towards them, the other would use the advantage to assail upon the shielded man either their claws or a well-placed bullet. They could not, as much as they wished, aid their comrade, or they would leave themselves dangerously vulnerable to an attack.  
  
Bronx had one man down on the floor, struggling to shred his teeth through the field as the man yelped in fear from having his stomach possibly ripped apart from the beast hungrily snapping and slobbering across the shield. Hudson now grappled with agent White, throwing the human over an empty bed and only to discover the thin man rolling away and opening up with his gun from a comfortable distance. Hudson deflected the beams with his sword doubling as an effective shield, the old soldier's reflexes sharp, and enough to keep him from losing an important body part. "Yuir a persistent little bastard, aren't ye?!" he growled through fanged teeth, a sense of humor acerbic, but truthful nonetheless.  
  
White would not allow the creature the dignity of a reply, and continued his assault against the large gargoyle advancing upon him, brandishing the damnable sword that waved and lunged against him with a speed almost blurring to the senses. He found no humor in this situation, especially when faced against what he knew to be an experienced soldier.  
  
"Dinna have anythin' t' say, laddie?!" he growled, his eyes burning white, his adrenaline and grief transforming the yielding Scottish brogue to a guttural snarl. "Dinna ye have any famous passages like all th' other would be conquerors?!" White was herded back towards the hospital entrance, as Hudson seemed to effectively employ the brunt of his rage into speed and fury. His sword cleaved through the ENG, missing White by a hair's breadth and reducing a thousand dollar machine to a useless, smoking trinket with its entrails sprawled across the linoleum. "Ye bastards killed me son! Ye took him from his mother b'fore he had th' chance t' live!" The anger emerged when presented with the chance for revenge, a promise made long ago to avenge his bloodline, ended by a single bullet guided by the motive of blind hatred. "Ye robbed me of my son!!"  
  
The vacant mask concealed a smile in a victory gone unnoticed, but appreciated. "We killed your son?" he echoed the statement with a chilled glee. "Good. All monsters deserve such a fate."  
  
He exploded with fire from his lungs and through his veins, and using his strength enhanced by undiluted fury, he heaved his sword as an extension of his bulging body against White's shield, bringing down blow after repeated blow on the human now left with no choice but to cower beneath vengeance taken a physical form, against justice for a dead child. "YE ROBBED ME OF MY SON!!! An' by his blood, yuill go t' meet whatever maker spawned ye!!" In some way, he was using this man as the object to channel everything that threatened to burst from him, as Hudson continually drove his blade into the thin layer of energy coating the masked human, each powerful blow meant to kill.  
  
White struggled to reload his emptied weapon under each blow, the energy field keeping him alive only just. The shield suddenly dissipated from the stress, and White found himself unarmed, and exposed to the infirmary air and the acrid, stale stench of anesthetic. He raised his eyes into the gnarled silhouette, the specter of death having chosen a fitting form. Hudson tightened to the grip on his sword, wanting for an end, for the cessation of the burning pain centered in his chest.  
  
"Hudson, don't do this!" Maria screamed from the laboratory doorway where Graeme and Ariana stood helplessly behind, having watched from the safety of obscurity Hudson descend to a lesser creature, the fabricated depiction of convincing Guild propaganda. "Hudson!!" She held a hand across her healing stomach, and knew her words alone would not tear the elder gargoyle away from the singular manifestation of all Guild.  
  
A horrific yelp of pain echoed into the entire hospital, as Bronx was shot directly in the stomach, and thrown off of the Guild member treating the gargoyle beast more like a tangible nightmare, an apparition to be wiped away without mercy or care. "Get the fuck away from me!!" a frenzied scream erupted. He rose, backing away from the wounded beast huddled in the corner of the room. He turned towards where the gargoyle had cornered his superior, and capitalized on the advantage, firing against the creature's back. Hudson fell to a single knee in the numbing pain, as his flesh smoldered and bubbled from the energy blast, the scent of his own burning skin repulsive. White used the respite to at last reload his weapon, and aimed it towards the gargoyle, only to be delivered upon by a closed fist swung wildly but true to its intended target. By Hudson's hand, he was thrown through the hospital's plate glass window, shattering into a thousand shards that rained a deadly transparency into the hallway. He landed in the corridor and against the opposite wall, his threat ended.  
  
Without a care to the trail of stitches running the length of her midsection or any hesitation of the consequence, Maria ran towards the other Guild member and using her own fragile form to collide with the shield, she interrupted the aim towards her onetime lover, sparing him another fatal blast. Angered, the man retaliated against the human who dared to protect the creatures by slapping her across the face with the back of his fist. She mewled in pain and hit the floor hard, her soft cry a herald to the gargoyle who turned his attentions towards the good captain's attacker.  
  
Hudson lunged forwards, and with the sheer lasting strength he held, drove his sword directly through the energy field, spearing the fragile man incased within. Hudson stared him down as the reality hit, and the cold blade grew warm when immersed in his innards. Disrupted, the shield dissolved around him, and as Hudson pulled the sword from the man's belly with a sickly scrape, he fell, his mask separating from his face when collapsing to the floor.  
  
****************************************  
  
Iliana was pushed back, rolling across the hospital floor to avoid the stream of bullets chewing up the flooring and nearly shredding her prized leather jacket. She fired back, the bullets following precisely the targeting laser and impacting against the Guild member's shield each with a pained scream, inflicting damage in their suicidal path but not enough to disrupt the shield and its power source. Her ammunition casing ran dry, the Magnum left without a bite, and Iliana stared up into the advancing Guild. "Heh," she smiled sweetly, hoping if anything to charm her way from an impending death, "oops. Sorry about the whole 'trying to put a hole in you' thing."  
  
He towered over her, the mask unwavering in dark sentiment. He did not appreciate the taunt.  
  
"What?! Hitler had a great sense of humor with that moustache of his, where's yours?!"  
  
He raised his gun, allowing his own laser to follow up her stomach, neck and face, to center on her forehead. She swore she saw the mask actually sneer.  
  
Iliana shuddered. "It was the Hitler crack, wasn't it?" He depressed the trigger, and only with Iliana's reaction, did she survive the onslaught of charged energy directed towards her with near the speed of sound by rolling away. "Uhm...HELP?!!!"  
  
From nowhere, a right hook, devastating, speed and swiftness and recent training her best weapon besides that of instincts inherited by a hunter and a detective. Delilah nearly pulled his head from his shoulders behind the power of her strike, the impact felt even through the shield. Again and again, without giving him the chance to recover from the blows, Delilah herded him towards the window. "Flying is considered to be the ultimate freedom." she urged, more a warning than any sort of jest or witty banter. Her hands clutched into his chest, she pushed him back and through the armored plating of the hospital window. Using her strength and his momentum, he tore through the sealed portal with the slightest of effort. "Be free." Into the storms he fell, into the cradle of rain and winds swelled and furious, descending several thousand feet to where slick black asphalt would greet him at the fatal speed of three hundred miles per hour, the shield laughably aerodynamic. His terrified expression would say more than his scream, trailing off, as the distance grew too great, and the thunder too great for his voice to be heard.  
  
"Bad ass, Delilah." grumbled Iliana, rubbing a hand across the bandage having salved her wounded skin from the apartment explosion. "But I'm not complaining, only that you cut the whole protection thing a little close." Lightheaded, and still weak, she found a copper-hued hand suddenly fall into view. Delilah offered, and she accepted begrudgingly, holding her features into a reluctant sneer at being saved by this woman especially. "How come you get to say the cool lines?"  
  
"I'm the heroine." the clone answered composedly, with the hint of a smirk. "You're just the annoying sidekick."  
  
Iliana frowned, a deep, resenting grimace lost to the gargoyle having turned around and fled towards the surgical bay. "Gabrielle to your Xena?!" Iliana snapped loudly. "I don't think so..."  
  
****************************************  
  
Annika struggled as best she could, the gun barrel slowly edging its way towards her covered face. Every move she made to counter the resistance he placed against her with the power of the energy shield was skillfully blocked, her body arched over a piece of surgical equipment and unable to exert needed force to push him back and away from her.  
  
He stayed damnably silent, the Guild pointman, doing his job as he was entrusted, to silently stalk and kill any resistance to his cause. Another flash passed through them, but the focus on each combatant was to best the other, and thus, the damage in reality went disregarded.  
  
Annika nudged him back with a turned shoulder and using the extra space, slipped her hand across his chest and grabbed for the gun. Her fingers disengaged the locking mechanism and she pulled quickly and expertly the energy ammunition chamber from the stalk, collapsing the gun into three separate pieces. Before the shock of disarmament was forced upon the pointman, Annika had reached behind her and grabbed for the equipment that had prodded painfully into her back. Defibrillator paddles.  
  
Fully charged for external defibrillation lest the current patient take a turn for the worse, and by Pierce's near-compulsive preparedness, Annika brandished them one in each hand, the wicked smile held beneath the white, sterile cotton of the surgical mask. The Guild man, recuperating from the sudden loss of his rifle, held up his hands to deflect the new weapon. Annika pressed the paddles into each of his palms, and unleashed the full charge of the powerful battery.  
  
The electricity coursed through the man's shield, stinging flesh and nerve impulses and sending a numbing coldness through his body. The surge of energy threw him back, against the wall where Iliana and Delilah had caught the latter half of the scuffle, watching from the doorway. Laid to the floor and helpless, the pointman jerked and convulsed inside the scrambled shield, spittle draining from the breathing slits in his mask as his brain fried within his skull.  
  
Annika hooked a talon to the edge of her mask, and pulled it away to reveal large, red lips curled into a vindictive smile.  
  
"Hey!" Pierce cried out as Annika looked up from the fallen Guild member. "Those were meant to save lives, not to bake fascists!"  
  
She shrugged innocently, "It worked, didn't it? Besides, I don't think we have the luxury of choice in any weapon we find."  
  
Seeing the pieces of the Guild weapon sprawled across the floor, and her face expressing all the amazement words could never breathe, Iliana then whispered, "How did you do that?"  
  
Annika's eyebrows flickered, denoting a repugnance in the fact Crowe's childhood training was at last used, and in her favor. "Daddy thought it best to train his little girl in the arts of war."  
  
"Well if you're finished electrocuting the bad guys, Annika," Pierce's voice broke through, his hands buried wrist deep inside of Rose's midsection, "I could use your help here." Annika moved immediately back to the table, resuming her nursing duties. "Clamp."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Jesus Christ..." Elisa gasped, having just witnessed her husband become a meal for the creature released into the city. "...Goliath."  
  
Apep raised its trunk into the storms and sprayed venom in an insolent hiss, a show of triumph, with a recovered Menhit constantly circling, wary of the presence she sensed. The serpent king but paused in its glory, an itch traveling the length of its stem and it looked down, as a hump expanded in its skin, the barrier containing the energy bulging hideously.  
  
An eruption of emerald light pierced the darkened sky, as a single beam of compressed energy tore through Apep's energy shell. The mimicry of flesh was disintegrated on a molecular level, burned away by the intense heat and power contained from the blast clearing a path for an angry, godlike creature. Goliath spurted from the hole in Apep's stomach, a prospective grave, and tumbled to the ground, covered in a glowing sapphire ooze. "A worthy try." said the two beings fused into one, their breaths heavy and short, as Apep moaned in pain and wavered, the energy flowing freely from the massive wound carved in its side, bleeding the same fluids covering Goliath.   
  
"We have studied Egyptian lore extensively," he growled, "and your predecessors would be ashamed of the slivers stolen from their souls." The ground shivered, trembled and shook, the core of the tremors Goliath himself, focusing the ancient energy flooding his arteries and adrenal glands, and Menhit, the lioness, backed off slowly, sensing the energy patterns of this adversary change radically. "You are not gods, only manifestations, mere collections of roaming energy molecules released by a madman." The sorcery exoskeleton expanded and surged and created a wave of energy come Goliath's cry. "But we are flesh, blood and fire, and the living embodiment of vengeance for every soul taken by your hands tonight." In this barren rift, he would not fear innocent within the crossfire and let loose the unbridled energy to capture both Menhit and the injured Apep within its wake.  
  
From her place atop the building, Elisa had to shield her eyes from the release of energy so great, she could feel the temperature rise considerably in the dampened air, a temperate glow radiating across her hands. It was if an explosion had claimed downtown Manhattan, heat and light a destructive force wielded expertly. It died down as quickly as it had flared, and Elisa blinked several times to readjust her eyes, and look back down into the chasm to see a lone figure resting within a fifty foot wide scorch mark. "God damn."  
  
Resting on his hands and knees, every breath rasped and pained, Goliath took a moment to refresh his quickly draining power reserves, the battery of a fay hybrid running on near empty. "Gods would not dissolve so easily."  
  
A spearhead stomped to the ground from the corner of his eye, a presence making itself known. Goliath turned his neck, to see another figure emerge from the stripped forest of broken buildings. Septu had returned, his injury breeding a trail of fire down his neck and back like a horse's mane, the shell damaged and cracked. But like a true warrior, he forged ahead, the enemy his primary concern and the one driving thought behind his renewed existence.  
  
"Ah yes," Goliath whispered, almost having forgotten about the last surviving creature, "the warrior." He was hunched, the physical form inhabited by two souls haggard and drained, and where the wings fashioned of sorcery touched to lavender flesh, it bled, matching trails seeping slowly down his knotted, muscular back. "We did not think you would be the last."  
  
Septu charged with his spear, and nearly missed the recuperating Goliath, who seemed lethargic in any response but to dodge the famed weapon revived alongside its master, perhaps a piece of the very article itself that grew this spawn in the fields of sowed Egyptian energy. It cleaved into the ground, and split the earth with little effort as Goliath rolled out of the way. The spear caught him in the upswing as he tried in vain to dodge the quick weapon, slapping the small figure away as if an insect in comparison. He evaded with a twist of his torso the spear, the wind screaming and severed by the mighty thrust.  
  
"Damnit, Goliath," Elisa muttered, trapped atop the building's peak and watching helplessly as her husband made no attempt at an offense, "what are you doing?"  
  
"We are stalling." he answered a question borne of frustration and somehow heard from hundreds of meters away. He allowed the giant warrior to stalk him, and stood directly underneath when the gap between the last two combatants quickly closed, his only movement consisting of an extended hand. Septu took notice. "Do you feel that?"  
  
A strange expression washed over the warrior god's face that halted his attack. Pain.  
  
"I see you now notice the strange sensation tugging within your chest." the winged creature taunted the suffering deity, though sober. Goliath slowly closed his fist, his long talons tucking into the thick palm. "We have placed our best approximation of a small, controlled black hole inside of you, and we admit," his fist clenched, shaking slightly with the exertion of magic subtle in its application, but destructive in its consequence, "we are intrigued to see the results."  
  
The forces of gravity pulled the energy towards a single point within his torso, and Septu's form distorted, and collapsed in on itself, a violent demise quick, and undoubtedly painful. It took only seconds for the sapphire-hued energy to implode within a sinkhole with gravitational forces so great as to consume even the light from its immediate surroundings. The giant was emaciated, and stripped of his size and magnificence by a conduit sucking the life from him, and ending the last of Sobek's creations with an audible pop, blinking from existence.  
  
Goliath fell to his knees, as a river of blood flowed across his tongue and ran hot onto the wetted pavement, the merged creature resting in the rain of energy particles, the lasting remnants of a fashioned god. Internal injuries, and an insufficient feed of life-sustaining magic to keep healed a damaged body, Goliath was weakening far beyond even Alexander's capabilities. He raised his hands, shimmering, his entire physical presence fading from the unwinding of time, and faced death on two fronts. "A useless exercise." he sighed, his eyes burning despondently. "USELESS!!!" His tortured scream echoed into the vacant wastes, a gravesite for hundreds unfortunate not to escape a petty vengeance wrought upon him, and thus, his province. Such devastation on a staggering degree, it was a meaningless death for any human that now lay beneath the layers of rubble. "Sobek..." Goliath lifted off into the air, tugging Elisa from her rooftop perch with a flick of his fingers and lashing her to his side. "Sobek will pay for this."  
  
****************************************  
  
Demona desperately forced the pile of broken stones from her body, and emerged into a violet sky, suckling the fresh air and franticly scanning the turret debris for her prey. Through the settling cloud of dust she found her, from the scent of blood, and the trail of red fluids painting the barren stone, and Demona leapt towards her younger self, who had managed to stray from the brunt of the tower's collapse by sheer, dumb luck. Bleeding herself, and hurt, she nonetheless continued her manic tirade unaffected by the collapse of the main Wyvern turret and caught the younger gargoyle crawling away to any sense and form of safety. "No, demon!!" she hissed, and clutched to her counterpart's lacerated neck. "Your fate is already decided..."  
  
Near them, a pile of stone exploded upwards and filled the sky, as Goliath uncovered both himself and Broadway with his wings lifting the tonnage from his body, entangled within the heavy debris. Disoriented, all he saw when attracted to the nearby commotion was a version of his mate attacking ruthlessly a pulpy mass beneath her. "My love...?"  
  
Bruised and scratched, the blood seeping into the thin layering of dust, Broadway shook off the fall, and though dazed, he pushed past Goliath to run towards Demona. But Goliath caught him, and they resumed their struggle, each trying to reach the battling duo first at all costs. "Get off me, damnit!!" Broadway yelled, Goliath's massive arms clenched firmly underneath his shoulders and impossible to budge. "That's not your mate!"  
  
"You think me dull-witted, fool?!"  
  
He flickered again, his body phasing from existence. "No, just goddamned persistent!"  
  
And from the stairway beyond, Sata emerged, battle-weary and spent, the remainder of the Wyvern clan still conscious from her attack quick on the intruder's heels. She spotted Demona promptly just beyond in a clearing, the fury of her cries unmistakable and drawing. "Demona!!"  
  
"Think of your children, samurai," the cerulean-skinned gargoyle yelled to the advancing gargoyle, her warning serving to halt Sata's approach, "let them be your last memory." She held by her talons her younger self, dying and unable to even move, let alone mount a defense. "For they will no longer exist after I am finished. And for that I am sorry."  
  
The very thought of losing her children, for never having shared a moonlit night with her mate in their conception sent a shiver through her wings, and thus, Sata held her place obediently, but watchful. "You cannot do this..." she pleaded, hoping there was a spark left within the creature of vengeance clutching her talons into her mirror's neck. A mere twitch, perhaps a flick of her wrist, and time would rupture with the younger Demona's spine.  
  
Seeing Demona ready herself, Broadway cried out, "Demona, no!!"  
  
"Demona?" Goliath tested the strange word as he relented his attack, seeing the form beneath what he thought his mate tremble with a bare sliver of life. He discovered to his horror, the limp figure was she, the sharer of his soul, and the holder of his dreams and destiny clutched within the claws of a distorted mirror image. He released Broadway completely to become an observer, allowing the time-displaced gargoyle to wade closer to Demona. The Wyvern clan having braved Sata's attack filtered onto the courtyard, but with Goliath's forthright gesture to back off, they withdrew to a safe position, as confused as their leader.  
  
"Don't you see what's happening to us?!" Broadway tried again, slowly stepping over the rubble from the fallen tower towards Demona, the gargess wary of his movement towards her. "To all of us?!" He held up his hand, a flicker passing through the flesh. "We're fading away, becoming nothing! Because of what you're doing!"  
  
Demona smiled in her victory, her hand, her entire body phasing as well, walking a fine line in between existence and nothingness. "Good," she whispered triumphantly, "that means I am so very close to setting right all that went wrong."  
  
"Don't you see?! Your one decision made our entire future, your one decision to help your clan saved billions and ended an entire war that would have condemned human and gargoyle alike!" yelled Broadway, trying desperately to convince her, to do anything that would release her hand from around the neck of her younger self. "The defeat of Madoc, the first hybrid child born of gargoyle and human, the release of the guardian spirit!!" As Goliath watched on helplessly, Broadway crept closer, keeping a continuous dialogue to distract, and convince if possible. "Everything is heaped on top of that one decision, layers upon layers of conscious choice and fated encounters, and without it, you would condemn billions to death before they even live! You'll either alter everything that allowed us to win that war, or absolutely destroy this timeline itself!"  
  
"I know." she warned, cognizant it seemed of her actions. "It is not destruction, it is restoration. We are all an anomaly in a broken stream of time, a singular mistake by my pride," her eyes flicked behind her quickly to gain sight of Broadway, "so please, save your whine."  
  
"My mating to Angela wasn't a mistake, neither was my life with her. You'd kill Elisa, Trinity, and a whole world not yet to be...is this what you want?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"And what about Todd?" whispered Sata from behind her, unrequited love an even better weapon than her sword, and Demona's brow quivered in just the name spoken.  
  
Hesitance played on her face, regret at last. "Todd?"  
  
****************************************  
  
The Epsilon's gatlings were unleashing their fury against Black, the Guild leader running from the endless stream of ammunition tearing across the castle rooftops, between the ancient stone overhangs and crooks of turrets and darkened, drooping bartizans, slick by rain, treacherous by their sharply angled slopes. Todd fired relentlessly with every weapon he had available, but he seemed to be set against an enemy superior in tactics and speed, able to presume his attacks before he even made them, and blend into the twisted shapes and contours of Wyvern's highest rooftops and disappear. "Slick bastard..." He relented the gatlings, the heavy barreled pipes hanging from each forearm winding down and hissing steam, and stowed them quickly to the sculpted brackets on his shoulder blades, to gain back better maneuverability on this precarious field. He hunted through eyes of technology, searching through the wetted darkness with his infrared. But Black's shield scattered any discernable sign of heat, and the lightning constantly streaking the sky made such an advantage utterly useless. "Where are you?!" he growled, stalking warily and hungrily, and brandishing his suit's unsheathed knifes against any shadow daring to move.  
  
Lightning tore through the stirs of violet, velvet fog, and Black slipped from his concealment firing into Todd's back, his weapon powerful and doing impressive damage to the thickly armored suit. Todd cringed, the impression of pain not detrimental, but sudden, and enough to throw off his balance and whatever composure he had managed to hold onto. He turned and fired with the suit's lasers, but missed, Black a specter already gone. Thunder rolled across the blanket of storms, confusing the suited human and allowing Black another opening as he circled around. Into Todd's chest came channeled energy, scorching the armored plating. "And here I thought this would be a challenge!" he yelled to the suit's operator over the primal roar of the storm and its constant expulsion of rain.  
  
"I've been thrown through tables by guys punier than you..." Todd muttered, extending to fire, but Black quickly moved into the field of his reach and knocked his arm and aim away, using the shield to pummel his fists into premeditated joints in the Epsilon's shell, attacking the weaknesses he knew from years of experience in weaponries. His long-range weapons rendered virtually useless, Todd tried in vain to retaliate versus Black's quick moves, his shield powerful, perhaps more than any other Guild member, and allowing him to become a weapon himself, living, breathing, thinking dirty urban warfare.  
  
"You're a damned novice!" berated Black, easily dodging the razor sharp swords from such close range, though the divided blades on each arm came far too close for him to surrender his offense. Todd's fighting ability was impressive for a self-learned barroom brawler, but predicable to a veteran of pain and wars this host of the winged mechanical beast could ever imagine, and Black capitalized with every misplaced thrust Todd put forth. "Why they allowed someone like you to defend this place is beyond me! Better have a mindless automaton expend its batteries than risk the life of a rookie!" Close quarter fighting required a skilled expert, and Black seemed to enjoy the fact the ultimate potential of this imposing suit was not being exercised, as it should be.  
  
He was partly wrong.  
  
Todd swung determinedly and backhanded the shielded man with enough force to collapse a small car, the strength delivered impacting against the shield and nearly crumpling the energy layer around a stunned Black, who tumbled back and down the rooftop slope. "No one calls me a rookie, you little bitch!!" Todd followed quickly, too stubborn and livid to relent the fight, and leapt towards him, Black rolling from a clawed foot crushing stone and steel shingling. He stood to catch Todd's hands falling down to exact whatever twisted desire the suit would grant, and they struggled against one another, each vying for dominance. "Why won't you die?!!" screamed the boy within the steel enclosure a mimic of demon.  
  
"I can't die!" Black strained to answer, the physical strength sheer and near overwhelming. "I'm an idea, a religion, a revolution in human philosophy! We are unity by force, and peace by elimination of everything deviant that threatens humanity!" Through the frosted eyeslits of his mask, Black shot fire towards this stubborn impediment, unable to fathom why he fought so hard to defend the breeding grounds for monsters. "We can't die, I can't die, and what makes you think you will be the one to dare make the attempt?"  
  
Todd sidestepped and gained an advantage with his clawed feet, using the traction to push Black backwards into an adjoining wall, crumbling the stonework. "I'm not bowing down to some fucking tyrant flying a Guild flag on a pile of dead bodies!"  
  
"You can't fight the grand designs of evolution!!"  
  
"Watch me."  
  
Their private battle waged on, each fighter ignoring the storms just above them, nearly touching them in its proximity and reaching down to swipe at them with bursts of celestial brilliance and cleansing fire, making white the world of darkness underneath the heel of nature.  
  
****************************************  
  
"That brash, unruly young man who transformed every conviction you held for the human race." Sata continued, edging even closer in a moment of uncertainty. "Who opened that darkness within you, and stole your heart while you both dined on blueberry crepes and chilled wine at your favorite Manhattan bistro. I know you care for him, I know you...love him."  
  
Demona closed her mouth, biting her lip to unsuccessfully keep it from shaking and spilling the truth. "With...all that I am..."  
  
"Will you condemn him to a future ruled by Madoc and the Unseelie?" she maintained the dialogue, creeping closer. The others held their breath, without any suspicion to the ramifications of this drama playing out before them. "Will you condemn him to slavery under a despotic fay?!"  
  
"He is strong! He will survive!"  
  
Sata shook her head, and hoped to make Demona understand in her fractured emotional state. "Would he survive the destruction of this timeline? Either by Madoc's rule or the end of reality, the human you love would die."  
  
Tears coursed, breathing slowed, the weight of her heart pressing against her chest making difficult any response. The pain was blinding, paralyzing to emotion and any thought beyond the quest to rid herself of that all-consuming agony. "...I...I don't care."  
  
"Yes, you do." Broadway interjected, almost directly opposite Sata and carefully treading through the broken remains of the turret. "You're more than this. Better. You've come so far, become a part of our clan more than anyone ever realized..."  
  
"I HAVE NO CLAN!!!" the demon snarled, tightening her grip on her younger counterpart's throat, and sending a strong, vanquishing ripple through the time travelers' flesh. "I have no ties to that pitiable brood of misfits and machines, I never did, and never will. I will save my daughter from the death she was doomed to...or I will end all of my pain in one fell swoop and Angela and I will be reunited! In every conceivable path, it will be a glorious climax."  
  
Sata was unbelieved of the words, the glacial tone used by the transformation of Demona into something far more volatile. "To save Angela you will kill Todd?! You will obliterate Elisa's daughter for your own?!" Her eyes erupted red, and she dug her heels into the stone floor. "You would dare kill my children and risk everything that is because you continually, childishly blame yourself?!!"  
  
Demona was beyond listening to the attempts to save what should not have been, steadying her gaze to the mewling female beneath her. "To watch eternity implode with a billion stars rupturing all at once will be a grand exploration of my deepest desires, samurai." Her talons sunk beneath the flesh of the beaten angel of the night, crushing an already severed larynx to constrict the airflow and tremble the weakened strands of time. The flashes grew stronger, more determined to wipe the travelers from their incursion into a time almost sacred in the span of history. "To see my daughter risen from the ashes is a final gift to her, as is this demon's death..." she paused, realizing she had treated her younger self as a separate entity, "my death, an assurance she shall live free and safe. You were good to her, Broadway, and for that...I am thankful." Both her hands curled to the battered flesh and starved the young gargoyle of oxygen, crushing her throat, esophagus and spinal cord.  
  
Sata was an instant blur set into motion by instinct alone, snapping from her place and tearing towards Demona with breakneck speed. Broadway watched from his vantage, too far to affect an attempt to aid the daring ronin, and as if time pulled back to allow a better view, the jade gargoyle slowed in her desperate leap. He could see the flecks of dust kicked up by her movement, he could see the flesh being punctured by Demona's claws, he swore he could even see the air ripple across his senses and discern the spark of oblivion being readied to envelop all of them.  
  
Sata collided with Demona, brushing against the demon with her weight coupled with the speed of her wild dash, the combination enough to oust Demona from her throne of bloodied flesh. The two females tumbled across the courtyard, as Broadway ran towards them and Goliath to his mate, her beaten body left to drown within a slick of her own blood.  
  
"GET AWAY FROM ME!!!" screamed Demona, enraged, struggling violently and ferociously against Sata, barely holding the belligerent gargoyle down. She raked her claws against Sata's cheek, and escaped from underneath her to reach into her loincloth, an object hidden within the white folds of fabric, only to be tackled by Broadway and the tremendous girth he used effectively. The phoenix gate fell from her belt, once clipped securely and now free, it skipped and rolled across the courtyard, a useless trinket wobbling to a stop. A small, simple revolver appeared as well, an antique amongst a usually favored modern cache joining the gate as it clattered onto the ground unseen by the travelers, a last resort if Demona was unable to undo all with her bare hands. "No!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!"  
  
"You won't bring her back!!" he yelled, wrapping around her to restrain her flailing limbs tearing across his skin. "And I won't let you take even my memories away from me! It's all I have left of her!"  
  
Demona howled, a chilling, deafening wail that echoed far and wide and across the Scottish cliffs and unto the Atlantic sea. But Broadway held firm against her violent protests, holding it seemed a force of nature against his chest, one wracked with ten times a lifetime of pain. He eyed Goliath carefully drawing his mate into the breadth of his arms, offering comfort to a gargoyle alive only just, the timeline secured with every rasped breath she coaxed into her punctured lungs. "Grab the gate!!" he yelled to Sata, trying desperately to keep a hold on Demona's legs. "Let's get the hell out of here!"  
  
Sata hesitated from letting go, then lunged to pluck the gate from the stones. She took only a moment to decipher the rudimentary controls, and breathed mystical fire from her hands as the gate summoned a portal back into the twenty first century. It vibrated strangely, and grew hot, Sata noticed, it was pulsing with life.  
  
Broadway attempted to lead a resistant Demona towards the portal, a difficult task like holding living fire, but remained vigilant in his direction forwards. "We're done here."  
  
"No," Demona whispered, "not yet." She slashed her claws across the resilient skin of his stomach, and Broadway screamed out in pain. She forced a spurred elbow into his face and he dropped her when blinded. Both she and the samurai reacted immediately, Sata for Demona, and Demona for the gun. The cerulean-skinned scooped the revolver from the stones and whirled around, and as Sata quickly reached to snatch the weapon away, it fired with deadly pinpoint accuracy. Sata caught hold a moment too late, as the bullet traveled in less than the blink of an eye towards its target. It hit its mark, the younger Demona jerking with the bullet passing clean through her skull. With one clap of metallic thunder and the sulfuric mist of gunpowder, she died in Goliath's arms.  
  
"Boom." Demona whispered, laughing precariously despite Broadway and Sata's horrified expressions. "There goes existence."  
  
****************************************  
  
She felt the death immediately, Infiniti having shuddered violently as the bullet tore through distant flesh, and the instant when the focal hub of this reality's flow of time kinked and shattered. "By Gaia...no..."  
  
****************************************  
  
It exploded, reality.  
  
Time did not change, it could not, it was unable to effect so many modifications at one instance, and thus, the cousins of space and time surged and coughed and hemorrhaged infinity all into one insignificant realm, with the catalyst of Demona's death so powerful it drew an abundance of others into this fragile strand. With so many vital threads of time severed all at once, the continuum vomited forcefully unto its inhabitants a blood-dimmed tide when unable to heal itself, an entity unlike any other. Wounds opened in the very fabric that separated an eternity of planes from each other, the sometimes-incompatible energies bleeding from the gashes and unfolding the purest of chaos.  
  
The entire atmosphere around the planet Earth, ground zero for the disruption in time and space, slowly began to ionize, the storms growing and extending their reach across the entire sphere from the nexus over Manhattan. Lightning intensified, and thunder rumbled a death knell to six billion inhabitants, the storm becoming the physical manifestation of the damage to the timestream and funneling beyond the atmosphere.  
  
****************************************  
  
The clan and Guild noticed the intermittent flashes grow more frequent, and more powerful underneath a raging storm like heaven's belly having split wide open from stem to stern. Lightning burned the sky in time with the cracks appearing to part the churning breath of nature, the storm appearing to form a wounded expression and screaming as time divided and twisted and melded together. The gladiators every single one stood within the nexus of a dying reality, peeling layer by intricate layer as the remaining threads snapped.  
  
The battle waged had become a lesser ideal on the face of anarchy and proverbial Hell on Earth, and all fighters exposed to the elements now braved the powerful gusts and rain of fire from above, destroying parapets and effectively introducing a destructive third party into the battle.  
  
They scattered, the clan retreating towards the castle, but Shadow, having strayed so far, merely chose this time to attack in the Guild's confusion, the ninja seeing this as an advantage though somewhat veiled in its attempt to help. They scattered to avoid the gashes ripping open in reality, and he delved into the retreating lines of Guild soldiers, picking them off one by one, roaring loud and vengefully between the cracks in time and space, enjoying the bloodlust of battle, the heat of the storms, the delicious loss of restraint.  
  
Othello took Desdemona into the folds of his wings to protect her, as he, Lexington, and MacBeth sought shelter against a ruined embankment. They took the interlude in chaos to rest beaten forms, but watched as the storm pressed down upon their home with a wrath never seen before. The flickers grew fierce, erasing the substance of their bodies and minds and the essence of their lives, teasing them with life and death all at once.  
  
"Look!!" cried Desdemona, as a flicker of light erupted onto the stones near them. As if the very air itself was ripped apart by an invisible hand, a portal opened, a window into another time and place. It was more a singular point in the multiverse, like a bead of sand on the shores of an ocean of infinite light. "What are they?!"  
  
"They are windows..." muttered Othello, his eyes holding glossed fear as every conceivable moment in time and alternate thought opened before them. Past present and future collided.  
  
****************************************  
  
Slightly dazed, Maria moaned, tasting the tickle of blood against her lip, and felt strong arms lifting her from the floor. Into Hudson's arms she was pulled and she found comfort against his chest. She forced a smile when encased in his warmth and the blanket of his sweet musk.  
  
"Are ye all right?" he whispered, seeing from underneath the corner of his brow the twins checking on a lethargic Bronx.  
  
"No one hurts MY man." she kidded, reaching into the soft bristle of his beard, only to clutch to his shoulder as the entire floor rumbled and shook. It blinked, it cracked, and the air around them tasted of acid. She stole deeper into his embrace, as the winds pounded against the Eyrie, the broken window a hole into an external bedlam as the winds howled through the torn steel plate. She faded quickly, as did the other occupants of the hospital. "Hudson, what's happening?!"  
  
His wing struts ached. "Somethin' be very wrong."  
  
****************************************  
  
Her body cooled under his touch, the warmth seeping through her wounds and the tremendous blood loss, and as Goliath held the limp form of his mate, he whispered to her, shook her lightly, trying if anything to rouse her from the clutch of death. But she was still, silent, lost to him for eternity. "My...angel of the night..." From his throat came a sound unlike anything ever heard before, a howl into the night and under the full moon that spilled across every turret and battlement. If was deafening, heartbreaking, tortured, it was a bay of loss and grief that rippled even the still waters of the ocean beyond the Wyvern cliffs.  
  
Sata turned away from the grisly sight, and unto a shaken, volatile Demona, lost in her own world, and continually laughing, the once unsteady mental balance perhaps tipped in one deciding favor. A shimmer passed through her, fading from substance to nothing, the samurai even feeling the momentary gap in flesh. "You have condemned us all..." she reviled the flame-haired gargess, crushing the small revolver in her hands, that which ended the world with a single shot. "How...how could you do such a thing, Demona?"  
  
She bared her teeth, the pain having drifted away in the promise of sweet, eternal slumber. "It felt good." With Sata's expression one of fear in Demona's indifference, Demona laughed, wickedly, coldly, as if she had disposed of a monster. "I should have used the revolver as soon as I arrived, but I so enjoyed the warmth of her blood on my hands." She studied her hand, fading, and dissolving from the timestream with a slight tingle spreading through her nimble fingers and on to the rest of her body, only the blood of her victim remaining tangible. "And now time will re-invent itself for the better. It will resurrect itself from the ashes of the old, touched by the wing of a phoenix."  
  
"Damnit..." Broadway muttered, running a hand down his weary features, having failed in his quest, and now faced with the end of everything he knew, in either an alteration he would not be aware of, or a death sentence to a cosmic pyre. He rubbed his talons over the Phoenix gate in his hand, peering upon the tiny, unassuming charm that caused all of this, slightly humming, and sighed.  
  
"What do we do?" Sata asked, flickering.  
  
"We go home...and be with our loved ones before the universe implodes."  
  
****************************************  
  
Lightning struck and Goliath fell, plunging into the city and barely stopping his descent just before his feet touched to the damaged ground. Elisa held in her scream as she and her husband hovered inches above the ground, another close call she could readily do without when in the initial stages of pregnancy. The skies were bleeding, and Goliath was weakening in his merging with Alexander, unable to continue on any longer without a respite long overdue.  
  
Elisa tumbled to the ground beside him, thankfully landing upon both feet. Pummeled by the driving rain, she sought refuge to the side of her husband, who struggled to rise. Standing on the edge of the crater, Goliath broke away from Elisa and stumbled into the scorched periphery of Sobek's earlier descent, only to discover an empty bedrock slab, carved by focused fire and stained by fresh blood. "What?" His eyes widened, kindled in bottle green with the spark of rage. "WHERE IS HE?!!!" he howled. "There is no method he could have used to escape!!"  
  
Elisa stepped beside him, the painted slab fresh with scarlet. She followed the erratic trail started from the bedrock's base, that somehow vanished along with the strange footprints distorted and partially washed away by the rain. Like he had taken to the air. "He must have had help."  
  
Goliath immediately hunched over, and clenched his talons into the ground, scraping jagged lines into the blackened soil and forcefully drawing the answers from the tacit earth. His nose twitched with a brimming scent, his senses besieged by familiarity, he could not believe what registered so clearly to gargoyle instincts and fay awareness in all things magic. "We can taste limestone dust." he growled, his teeth clenched tightly as to grind diamonds between the white, fanged enamel. "We can smell a familiar energy pattern." The scorched soil sifted lightly through his fingers, as he attempted to filter the distinctiveness of the second hand in Sobek's escape. "Wyvern..." A sudden fear crept into their hearts, both Goliath and Alexander noticing a trail all too precise in the direction towards their castle home. It was an unimaginable premise, but the danger presented was too significant to ignore. "We must go. Now!"  
  
Lightning struck again, and this time, the sudden loss of substance actually pained Elisa, fading and reappearing as the timeline took great strides to remind them of the true danger. She cringed, the pain strangely centered in her stomach as mother and the undeveloped child physically separated between the gap of seconds. "Goliath..." she winced, as her knees buckled and gave out. She fell, much to Goliath's dismay.  
  
A stream of fire channeled towards the ground and hit near them once more, the crack deafening and the very air charged. Flames exploded from the strike, a fire raging into the spilled remnants of fuel and wooden debris as the gargoyle threw his energy wings around the human leaning against his chest in an instinct of protection. Goliath and Alexander could feel every individual molecule compress and fade in their shared physical form, then flicker back. "The wound," he swept his gaze towards the castle hidden within the churn of storm, "is centered above Wyvern's parapets."  
  
Elisa fell her jaw, her home under siege from two opposing forces, humanity and nature. Her hand clenched onto Goliath's arm. "Trinity..."  
  
The magical field was revived through great exertion, and Goliath flapped his fading wings to steal into the air and bend the currents, no matter how strong, to his will alone. "Our daughters need us." It was a strain even to gain altitude, and the gargoyle rose slowly but surely into the air, he and Elisa heading towards their home in a desperate race.  
  
****************************************  
  
Nursing a gash across the uppermost rim of his mask, running from brow to hairline, White stumbled down the hallway away from the hospital, his entire force either unconscious, dead, or thrown to the mercy of the winds. He was disoriented from the brutal egress from the infirmary and the impact against the wall, the flashes in time hindering his escape. The floor shook beneath him, making his tread unstable as he tried in vain to navigate the hallway with blurred vision.  
  
Climbing back up the rope ladder used to descend into the elevator shaft from the hospital, White spoke clearly, angrily into his transceiver, "White to any available chopper!"  
  
No response, with the growing storms now playing havoc with the radio systems, communications had suddenly become unreliable.  
  
Dangling on a steel-braided ladder after being defeated so easily and massaging his throbbing temples with every chance he got, White was beyond furious. "This is agent White to any available Guild helicopter!" he screamed. "Respond!! NOW!!!"  
  
"...zzzzzzEcho One here..." the surviving pilot replied through static, a little more than busy as the last remaining helicopter strived to endure the aerial battle and the raging storms. "...sir, we've gotzzzzzztrouble, zzzzzomething is wrong, the zzztorms they're..."  
  
"I don't give a damn about the storms!" the Guild second-in-command passed off a dire warning in order to sate his anger and complete this mission at any cost. "Ready all available missiles."  
  
"...zzzzzzzzwe don't have clearancezzzzzz to fire on the castle!..." the pilot answered, his voice tightened by anxiety. "...We needzzzzzzBlack's approval..."  
  
"I am second in command of this organization, young blood!! And I want every available missile you have ready to melt this place to its girders! Besides," his mask concealed a malicious grin, "Black's probably already dead..."  
  
****************************************  
  
A section of rooftop beside Black exploded as the lightning tore a chunk from their battlefield, and his shield flickered, the power to sustain the sheath exhausted by the fight with the armored sentinel. They were thrown back by the strike from above, Black recovering quicker than Todd, and he capitalized quickly, razing his gun directly into the Epsilon's midsection, exploding a barrage of energy into the armor's midsection.  
  
Todd knocked him away and crawled off between the oddly colored lightning, the armor damaged, and his stomach on fire. Black followed tenaciously, the upper hand his until the user decided to unleash the full potential of this suit by way of reckless abandon. Firing into Todd's back between the wings while he made his retreat to a safer position, Black brewed fire from the Epsilon's steel alloy skin. Todd dropped to one knee and whirled around, his arm being driven into Black's chest from behind his retracted wing, the impact oscillating through the shield like some giant tuning fork, shearing against Black's equilibrium. Todd opened his forearm laser, Black aimed his gun, and they grabbed each other's arms, dancing a dangerous stalemate against each other.  
  
Lightning struck once more, perhaps to prove its superiority over these men who deemed themselves greater than nature, a forked tongue lashing from the clouds and forcing them away from each other in an explosion of light and fire and the power of a freight train. Black's near-depleted shield completely dispersed, the Guild leader rolling down the rooftop slope to a stop, steam rising from his exposed leather suit. Todd's neural link to the suit was forcibly disrupted, entrapping him within a barely functioning husk. They both were forcibly disarmed.  
  
Without the mindlink to properly control the suit now heavy and unresponsive, and a headache erupting from the damaged circuitry patches on his forehead and spine, Todd managed to turn himself over, only to have a gun barrel press against the steel membrane of his throat, where the slim seams of titanium alloy overlapped to construct the neck joint. "...shit..."  
  
Black had recovered quickly to take advantage, and held Todd down with a knee against his chest and a weapon to his neck. His long, sterling-streaked tress hung limply over the edges of his mask, the leader exposed to the rains for the first time tonight. "I told you," he hissed, lodging the gun securely into the armor linkage, "you can't fight evolution!"  
  
"Evolution is already happening, it's called humanity growing to accept the differences they see everyday!" The Epsilon's eyes burned an emerald flame in defiance. "You're obsolete, bastard."  
  
The bravado repelled easily, Black eased the barrel of his weapon between the armor's seams, to better assure his threat was sincere. "Take off your mask," he warned again, "or I make a new hole for you to breathe through!"  
  
"My armor will deflect your little capgun!!"  
  
"Are you sure?!" he pressed, his hand only twitching to make the shot and deprive the operator of this suit his neck. "Are you absolutely secure in that steel shell of yours?! There are chinks in every suit of armor, and I think I just found yours! Before you blink, I could kill you!!" Todd swallowed, hesitating in any answer or reprisal that could cost him dearly. His apprehension forced compliance, and Black's strategy of using such fear proved a greater tactic than an all-out, physical brawl he knew he might not win without the equalizer of his shield. "Take off the mask!!" he ordered.  
  
Inside the helmet, Todd licked the beads of sweat having journeyed in tiny streams to curl over his upper lip, and lingered, the pain of the object pressing into his throat registering to the suit's sensors.  
  
Black thrust the gun barrel harder into Todd's neck, and howled over the storms, "TAKE IT OFF!!!"  
  
The Epsilon mask split down the center, an invisible seam emerging and hissing hydraulic steam, the sides of the mask moving away to reveal a face so young compared to what he ever imagined. "A boy..." he whispered, startled, the features staring back at him somehow familiar in their distortion of his own. "A goddamned boy nearly disrupted months of meticulous planning. I hate youth, so damned impulsive..." A flash of silver caught his eye in the lightning, and Black grabbed for the necklace around Todd's neck, having peeked just above the armor rim to be seen. He grabbed it, and held the small cross in his palm, studying the trinket, engrossed by a sudden recollection unearthed from years of a constant refusal to remember. "Where did you get this?!" he screamed towards Todd, but the young man declined to answer. The gun now pressed to exposed flesh, and Black reiterated, "Where'd you get this?!!"  
  
"It's...it's my mother's..."  
  
"Your mother's...?" he whispered, running his gloved hand over the small silver cross where a familiar inscription was carved by his own demand, a swirl of memories so powerful they literally took his breath away. "Rose." His eyes ascended slowly towards his adversary's face, as if he feared what now lay there, and instead of an unknown, he found an incredible likeness that plagued every dream, and twisted every nightmare. He recognized this young man, this boy, and found his own eyes staring back at him, stormcloud gray with a touch of sky sapphire. "T-Todd??" he gasped. "Oh my god..." The gun released from Todd's throat, he backed away, almost stumbling, almost deathly afraid of the young man staring at him quizzically, as if a spirit from his past come to haunt him. He tripped over the castle embellishment wet and meant for simple decoration but now a detriment to his escape, his breathing erratic, and his wide-eyed stare frenzied and unbelieved.  
  
"How do you know my name?!" Todd asked, almost demanded, when seeing the Guild leader's willingness to bring this battle to the verge of death immediately vanquished. "Who are you?!" he called out against the erupting storms, his voice anguished much like the rolling groan of nature. "Who are you?!!"  
  
He was gone, lost to the streams of lightning bleeding from the clouds, and the shadows, black against black a perfect camouflage for his escape from the rooftop, leaving Todd with an anger gone unfulfilled and many more questions left unanswered.  
  
****************************************  
  
He was running as fast as his legs would carry, trying to navigate his way through the labyrinthine halls twisting and curving to get to the courtyard, his journey hampered by the periodic flashes in time, that which made flesh intangible for moments at a time. Black never fully expected what he would find here, he knew he was leading his team into dangerous territory, but to discover a ghost that wore his face cracked the glacial exterior of the Guild leader and forced upon him a frightening sensation, that of panic, and fear. He reached to his mask and opened a communications channel to every available Guild receiver. "Black to troop carriers! Get back to Wyvern now!!" His voice bordered on a scream, as he commanded his forces through the static. "We're pulling out!! I repeat, Black to all Guild!! Retreat to the outer edges for immediate evac! Now!!"  
  
"...zzzzzwhat?!..." came White's protest through his communications device, surprised perhaps to hear of his leader's survival. "...We're so close!! We'vezzzzzlost so many on this missionzzzzzzz...and I'm damned sure going to..."  
  
He would not endanger the boy he had abandoned on the rooftops any longer, and with the storms getting stronger by the minute, the rest of his forces were threatened. "I SAID RETREAT!!! NOW!!!"  
  
"...Damnit, NO!!!..." screamed White. "...Echo One, zzzzzzprepare to fire missileszzzz!!..."  
  
"Belay that order!!" Black tried to overturn his second-in-command's rash decision, static layering across his comm-channel and breaking his words apart. "Get all forces out now!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
Pulling himself from the elevator shaft, White took off into the hallway, searching for the exit outside. "I won't let these creatures exist any longer!!" he yelled into his mask transceiver towards Black, wherever he may be. "We've come too far to give up now." He managed to find a doorway to the exterior, and emerged into the courtyard, and into chaos, the storms wreaking havoc as they strafed lightning across the delicate stone structures. He saw the struggling craft in the sky, uncaring of the helicopter's desperate fight for dominance. "Echo One! Aim at the main castle structures and fire!! Reduce this place to rubble!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
The creature of Goliath and Alexander perked up immediately, such hatred, such contempt acting like a connecting thread from the nearby metropolitan pillar to his acute senses. They looked with fear towards where in the distance, where their refuge to rest of an alley afforded a view through the slender corridor mouth of the grand structure having risen from the depths of the city to tame the sky itself.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Mom..." It was Alexander who sensed the want for revenge of fallen comrades, of a burning desire for extinction heard like a scream inside of his brain. And that hatred for an entire species threatened the most important thing to him.  
  
Inside the shared conscious, Goliath rubbed his brow, his eyes flickering as the exhaustion sapped his strength and concentration. Through Alexander, he knew of what the child feared, he could see the concern disfigure youthful features into a mask all too decipherable. "Go."  
  
Alexander centered on his companion, frightened to abandon him lest he succumb to the injuries. "But..."  
  
"Separate yourself from me," he commanded, his gentle voice now imposing, and from equal partners maintaining the symmetry to a leader and his underling, Goliath dominated the contest of wills, "I am drawing your remaining strength to keep my body healed."  
  
He shook his head, breeding tears from the edges of his eyes. It seemed stubbornness was a trait inherited by heroes, even those still not old enough to even comprehend their valor. "No, I don't wanna!"  
  
"NOW!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
An explosion of light engulfed the alley, consuming the brick walls on either side, as Alexander was forced from Goliath's body by the gargoyle's sheer will, the child expunged into the cold desolation of reality. He tumbled to the urban corridor in front of an astonished Elisa, and immediately the child felt the isolation of an empty consciousness, without that voice, that confidence and intelligence helping him to become more than the simple red-headed crossbreed. When the emerald glow at last subsided and died out, Goliath emerged, broken, battered, and bleeding profusely, his wings still despairingly absent from his shoulders. Open gashes were the physical scar of his battle with Sobek, and blood poured freely, the scent noxious, tinny and overwhelming.  
  
Elisa immediately threw herself to his side, to help steady the behemoth as he slumped against the building wall without the strength to support himself. "Goliath..." Roaming her hands over his body, mindful of the numerous and grisly lacerations on almost every limb and piece and appearing exactly how they had before, she tried if anything to keep him erect.  
  
Alexander hesitated in seeing Goliath as he once was, near death, then took off in tears past the Maza couple, and threw himself into the air, a bubble of bottle green forming around him as he ascended quickly to the spire reaching far beyond the churning clouds.  
  
"...where...am I...?" Goliath asked feebly, his voice now a whisper, the merging having taken everything he had left to give.  
  
"Don't you remember?"  
  
Goliath struggled to grasp unto a swirl of memories, of purest power, of near-godhood almost within his reach and then torn away. "...y-yes...but most of it...is a haze..." he whispered, and then lost his balance. He fell, collapsing seven hundred pounds onto the concrete and puddles of collected rainwater, a muddy brown fused with scarlet.  
  
Elisa fell with him, able to keep his skull from banging against the cold, urban floor with her hand behind his head, twined gently into the wet strands returned to a deep russet sable. "No, come on, Goliath!" she screamed, a shimmer sweeping across her skin, her entire body being ravaged. "Come on, you have to move!" She looked over her shoulder, between the buildings that would threaten to be her husband's tomb, and found within the tempest gone mad the steel foundation that held their home above. "We're almost there!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
Dodging the lightning, forging a desperate path through the Steel Clan and the Cyber-Biotics drones, the last remaining Guild attack helicopter made its way to the proper altitude and station to lock its targeting systems onto the main castle structures. The pilot struggled to maintain the position with the remainder of the castle's defensive automatons focusing their attack onto the one last Guild craft, as the gunner readied for a weapons lock.  
  
"Did we receive confirmation from Black?!" yelled the pilot, dodging gunfire from the drones scraping across the shield, blanketing the helicopter cockpit in a pale rose.  
  
"No!" replied the gunner. "I can't reach him, there's nothing but garbled static coming through the lines!"  
  
"Everyone else is out and the transports are pulling away, and I can't hold myself here for long! The shield's going, and either the defenses are going to finish us or these storms will!!"  
  
The computer signaled the lock, and the gunner quickly made his decision by agent White's concord, hoping he would be justified in taking out the creatures' roost, risking a deluge of steel and stone upon the innocents surrounding the Eyrie building. From the attack craft's artillery wings exploded fire and smoke, and four missiles emerged into the storms, heading straight towards Wyvern with a piercing shriek.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Oh bloody hell." MacBeth muttered darkly into the lapel of his duster, seeing the missiles direct themselves to just above them, ensuring devastation on a scale even further than the storms could ever wreak. It was not enough to have a raging temporal storm and fissures between the delicate membranes of time, but a stubborn adversary merely adding more fuel to the fire. He damned his sense of honor, and the debt owed to these creatures for helping him reclaim a soul once lost. "We've got trouble."  
  
Mother detected the missiles and guided the remaining cannons to fire against the incoming missiles, huge, roaring behemoths that deflected every shot the computer intelligence could rally. They were shielded as well, and growing closer. "Unable to affect damage." she reported sadly, but fired continuously nonetheless in any slim chance she could break through. "Prepare for imminent impact." Her holographic form shimmered in a blink in time, and she closed light-bred eyes. "I am sorry."  
  
"NO!!!"  
  
The missiles suddenly ruptured from the inside out, as if the disembodied scream had shattered them like glass, the energy shields containing the powerful explosions meant to tear apart the very foundation of the ancient fortress. The shields dissolved and scattered, and released the kinetic force of the missiles into a harmless spray of fire and debris. From the edge of the castle, floated a small, contained sphere that bobbed and weaved itself through the flashes of lightning, and rose to a sufficient height to allow the passenger to stare down the gullet of the Guild helicopter.  
  
"What the hell...?" whispered the pilot, though his craft was buffeted violently on all sides, his eyes focused on the strange glowing ball of energy holding itself at the same altitude.  
  
Alexander was not impressed, nor was he appreciable of anyone who would dare hurt his family in such a brutal manner. He sat cross-legged inside of his bubble, impervious to the rain and protected from the brunt of wind and storm, though fading like all the rest, cracking and preparing to shatter in the waves of time. He raised his hand, splayed chubby fingers and scowled menacingly. "Go away." His bubble surged and channeled a stream of liquid energy towards the helicopter, and engulfed the craft, scraping away the entire defensive shield in a single, powerful blast.  
  
The helicopter emerged when the pilot descended sharply to escape the discharge, as Mother's cannons fired in time with the remaining Steel Clan and drones. The last attack craft exploded in mid-air from the endless barrage, ending its threat in a fiery scream.  
  
Alexander remained where he was, watching with boyish fascination the machines molded after gargoyles and the smaller, wasp-like drones fly past him towards the Guild members fleeing for their lives from the storms. He slowly looked up, and he met the entity surging over the spires of his home with a gaze hollow and cold, and irritated. He could feel the threads snapping one by one, bleeding into this timeline, and though the mechanics of temporal tampering perhaps bewildered him, he saw what no one else did. He perceived with faerie eyes every strand of every timeline, every loose end dangling free, and formed a simple plan to counter a convoluted task.  
  
"Gotta grab th' strings," he chirped, satisfied in his scheme, "an' make 'em better."  
  
****************************************  
  
The portal allowed them access back into their time, and from tranquil Scottish skies they emerged into chaos unleashed onto their rightful home. Broadway came through first leading a shaken Demona, with Sata having taken up the rear, and the party immediately raised their wings to deflect the howling winds and rain, surprised by the sheer ferocity.  
  
It was a squall having ascended from a simple weather phenomenon, to become a temporal storm that bred the destruction of their existence, and the gargoyles found refuge as best they could against a broken wall.  
  
Demona instead kept her eyes trained onto the sky, where lightning flashed, and the constant blinks turned everything white for seconds at a time. She smiled, the rain warm and the thunder a final herald that seemed to grow louder with her presence. The coordinator of all the chaos had returned, and in retaliation, the storms growled against her. She in turn wandered from the flaming portal that closed quickly and into the middle of the bedlam erupted, staring up into the face of the strongest adversary she had bested, and without a care for her safety. "...so beautiful..."  
  
As he watched her, the Phoenix gate in Broadway's hand suddenly flared with fire, the familiar energies in this timeline rousing the medallion to life. "Damn!!" he wailed in pain, his hand burned and the skin bubbling across his palm. "What the hell...?"  
  
Sata watched the gate tumble across the hands as if guided by an invisible string, flashing across time periods as easily as one would cross between rooms. "It is hungry..." She understood this resurrected talisman's nature, and even without the influence of the trickster Loki, it possessed a mind of its own. It was searching, looking for the energy that fed it, that gave it life, and subsequent to a frenzied dance across the winds in flame it disappeared within a curl of its own fire. Glad to see it gone, her eyes returned to the courtyard, with the Guild members retreating as best they could between the surges of lightning consuming stone, and the portals opening between timelines, dragging wounded kin towards the outer edges of the cornices and waiting for the cargo helicopters to dock against the sides and evacuate their forces.  
  
Several retreating Guild members were in front of her, and fell into the wake of a sudden sinkhole in gravity, pulling them towards an emerging portal's churning periphery. The window unstable around the edges, the men were caught between two different times and ripped apart, their bodies torn and shredded at the molecular level and dispersed into harmless, background radiation. Another was hit dead on by the lightning, searching out potential targets and obliterating the inhabitants of this particular timeline, and all that would remain of the masked man would be a disembodied scream and a scorch mark spraying ash across the wet stones.  
  
She swallowed, and wished their souls well in such a gruesome fate. It was then she noticed an absence to her side, as Demona had strayed far into the open. "Demona!!" she screamed the bringer of all of this, standing calmly in the middle of the courtyard and seemingly unaffected by the lightning tracing paths of fire across the stones. "What are you doing?!"  
  
"I wish to be touched by the very hand of God himself," spreading her arms to the sky, an invitation to seize her soul from this mortal shell, she awaited oblivion, "and annihilated only by a rival deserved of the honor."  
  
****************************************  
  
"...I was...so foolish..." Goliath whispered, babbling incoherently with the loss of blood, vaguely aware of Elisa's hand guiding through his hair. "...perhaps I am...not fit..."  
  
"Yes, you are." Elisa argued, leaning over him, hoping to be the beacon that kept him from slipping into an unreachable unconsciousness. Gently, she rode her knuckles down the sharp ridge of his brow, tracing strong features slick and tacky with the coagulating blood adhering to lavender skin. In the chaos of a ruptured timestream, she ignored the impending doom if only to steal those last few moments to comfort her mate. "Goliath, I'm sorry...for taking from you what was rightfully yours..."  
  
"...you did...what you thought...was right...I understand that now..." He coughed a blood-gargled laughter from his throat. "...you were always...too damned proactive...for your...own good..." His eyes wavered, and the grip on Elisa's hand faltered as the gargoyle started losing consciousness much to her dread.  
  
Elisa noticed his breathing slow, so hoarse, rasped and painful with each gulp of air, and now, barely a whisper. "Come on! Damnit, Goliath! You were ready to sacrifice your life just an hour before, and now you're suddenly giving up?!!"  
  
He tried, he fought, but lost the battle against the darkness. He mouthed silent words lost on a breathless murmur, his perception drifting.  
  
"Come on, Goliath! We may only have moments left! Make them count!" She urged him, but he did not budge, his eyes rolling to the back of his head. "Make them count for Trinity! You said our daughters need you! You're damned right they do! We all do. I need you, your baby needs you!!" She grabbed the massive paw, and placed it to the warmth of her exposed stomach, a contact of flesh, of father and the child he created through a bonding of love and passion. "Feel that, Goliath! Our baby! Feel the heartbeat, feel the life! You could always do that, you knew when Trinity was kicking even before I did!" She screamed, and used everything she had to raise the toppled giant stubbornly refusing to move when so very close to sanctuary. "You know what the future Trinity said! Her name is Liberty!! Feel her!! FEEL HER INSIDE OF ME!!! DON'T GIVE UP ON HER!!! COME ON!!! DON'T GIVE UP!!!" Her words unanswered, she leaned over and sobbed into his chest, her pleas reduced to an unintelligible whisper amidst the pool of tears trickling across the clefts of his muscled chest. "Don't give up..."  
  
Goliath stirred, and found the strength to slowly open his eyes.  
  
****************************************  
  
The portals grew in size and number, exploding different threads into this one trying if anything to keep from completely shattering and sending an infinite amount of hosts to a premature death. Flickering from existence, but unwilling to allow even the universe to chose his manner of death, Shadow continued to fight against the retreating forces. He dodged the portals' outer orifices as they suddenly burst open all around him, seeing firsthand what two timelines grinding against one another could do to all too fragile flesh.  
  
The portals displayed an eerie sight, as all and every conceivable sentient choice was played out in different worlds. Gargoyles ascendant to rule an emptied world, the extinction of an entire species, children of mixed blood and race and heritage, couplings never before thought probable, every window that opened teased the ninja with a possible realm. Even a young, winged girl with dark skin and white hair, and a glowing Japanese tattoo etched onto her familiar, pointed brow. He steadied his gaze, and they stared at each other.  
  
"Father?" she called through the intersection of timelines.  
  
"Who...?" Another portal suddenly opened to his side, nearly shredding his wing if not his reaction immediate, and an alternative world and time fell forcefully into view.  
  
The mahogany of Shadow's eyes reflected a battle, this battle, or at least a version near identical, the Guild and clan engaged against each other and an innocent moments from death. It was a moment horridly familiar, in the fact he was too far away then to make any effort to help his fallen comrade and the window taunted him with another chance to rectify his self-blamed failure. "Angela..." He chose quickly between the two windows, and instinct would ultimately guide him, as Shadow rose and being careful not to touch any of his flesh to the portal's churning edge, leapt clean through.  
  
****************************************  
  
Barely less than an hour before now in a sliver among eternity, where a singular Guild member would gain fame for killing a beast. In an offering of chance, he found the lavender female distracted, a deadly mistake when not a clansmen around to dutifully watch her back, and he fired when the path was sufficiently opened up between his brethren.  
  
"Angela!" Lexington warned from across the courtyard when seeing the shooter aim for her back, his voice but drowned in the wake of another clap of thunder.  
  
The bullets hailed an unearthly scream as they filled the air with a lightning flash of shaped copper and a stream of oily smoke curling within the wake, a crossfire of steel which ensnared an innocent in their web drawn across the courtyard. She was graceful in her movements to avoid such a fate until now, and even the best of agility awarded by a form superior to man could not escape an inevitability akin to this.  
  
But with the perversion of the timeline, the daughter of Goliath now had a guardian angel injected into her universe and watching for this very instant, as Shadow emerged and threw himself into the proven-fatal trajectory of the Guild's bullets. They clipped across the spurs on his shoulders as he stole Angela into his arms and protected her from a fated path.  
  
"Shadow??"  
  
"Hush." Wordlessly, he veered through the crowd with Angela in his arms, caught sight of his counterpart, blinked in surprise at his mirror image immersed in battle, and headed off back towards the portal. With Angela secured, he jumped through and rolled across the stones, dodging between electrical columns arcing from cloud to stone and the Wyvern defense automatons merely herding the Guild stragglers towards the castle's edges.  
  
He ran to where the clan had holed up against the temporal storm, stopped directly in front of them, and opened his wings to deliver his cargo. Before a crowd of onlookers staring wide-eyed at his trophy, a rescued Angela tumbled freely from the dark leather cloak.  
  
"Holy shit..." whispered Lexington.  
  
Angela whisked the wet tendrils of her hair from her brow, and raised her eyes. "What is everyone looking at?"  
  
"Angela?"  
  
"Lexington..." The flashes in time ripped through her skin, liquefying her essence. She grunted when her lungs suddenly opened up to the air in a fraction of a second, the intangibility loosening her mortal covering. "What's happening?"  
  
The cyborg settled his brow mournfully, Angela having escaped one death only to face another. "The end of the world."  
  
****************************************  
  
The bubble rose higher into the clouds, just beneath the massive eddy that covered all of Manhattan and spread across the Eastern coast, a veil of darkness and death. Alexander tested the strength of the temporal storm, the lightning attracted like a magnet to his Avalon magicks and attempting to sear the sheltered child within his refuge of energy. The winds unable to penetrate the interior of the bubble, Alexander floated freely, serenely, his legs dangling beneath him as he stared into the heart of the tempest, contemplating.  
  
He was gathering all of his energy, the last reserves left from defeating false gods, and pushing against the storm itself, the heart of the rupture in time. He could see every mutinous thread that had snapped and hung free, every timeline that spilled into this one and transformed nature into an extension of its pain. The bubble around him expanded, lengthened, to become a long shaft of light that spilled into the clouds and divided the darkness with a brilliant emerald needle. It made contact with the courtyard, and inside the narrow column lay order, tranquility, and a mended reality.  
  
The boy struggled to tie these loose threads together, to meet each severed end to its mate, and line-by-line he repaired the damage as fast as a new breach would reveal itself. The beam of light, of purest, unfiltered energy, of a soul made visible to the human eye grew and expanded into the storms bringing lightning down upon the castle and surrounding populace. It burst through the atmosphere and touched the heavens, shooting into the coldness of space and far beyond.  
  
****************************************  
  
A simple chime heralded the arrival of the cab behind the sterling elevator doors, a journey from the earth to the heavens within a steel tube shaking with the sway of the building itself. The doors slid open, and out fell Goliath, collapsing into the spacious corridor, a trail of blood chasing his battered form and led from the larger slick inside the cab. Having traveled with her husband via the elevator from the private parking garage, Elisa now hugged herself around his upper arm, steering her husband as he precariously provided locomotion through the violently shaking building. Embellishment fell in the severe tremors, the building falling to pieces around them and reality pulsing and wrinkling, their journey was nearing completion.  
  
"...we must...find our children..." Goliath whispered, using his hand clenched into the stone walls to slowly prod himself along, a reckless chase. "...and ensure...they are safe..."  
  
She noticed the desperation turn bruised features into a clear sign of what troubled him. "What is it, Goliath?" she demanded, exhausted from carrying a seven hundred pound creature through the city streets and up two thousand feet, her arms and hands completely covered in his blood, blackened and moist. "What could possibly scare you more than our own reality puking all over us?"  
  
Goliath struggled to remember through a haze of magic so great as to steal even his memories, and the rush of godhood, a danger inherent and made frighteningly valid by a small child's otherworldly senses. "I...I do not know...I cannot remember...Alex took with him...almost everything..." He hurried his pace, knowing there was an evil lurking just beyond the realm of his memories taken when the merger between he and Alexander was forcefully disrupted. "...but there is danger beyond these flashes..." he gasped, reduced to a crawl, besieged by intermittent flashes stealing their physical forms. "...I will...see my daughters..." Goliath's determination was resolute, even as he body slowly failed him and his vision blurred. "...I will be with them...and if these are our last moments...Trinity will not face death alone..."  
  
They turned into the corridor where housed the main computer room, and immediately stepped onto a corpse still shielded by the remnants of the power source attached to his armory belt. Two more Guild bodies lay further up towards the doorway, pooled in their blood as if a layer of veneer stained wine red, and threadbare by the exertion of an animal. It was a massacre contained into the narrow junction between corridors and painting the edges of the computer room door a deep, viscous burgundy.  
  
Elisa tasted the bile rising in her throat, the smell a powerful contaminant adhering to the walls. "Jesus..."  
  
"Demona's signature scribed in blood."  
  
Led by the jest in an all too familiar tone, Goliath settled his eyes beyond the dead bodies to another lying slumped and motionless against the stone wall, holding in the flow of blood from his side, a trial behind him leading down the passageway and disappearing into nothingness where the hall curved from sight. Time blinked, hemorrhaged and the wounded gargoyle suffered as well as the Mazas. "Brooklyn."  
  
He nodded to the leader he had dethroned, detecting the anger welling in his throat, and studying the majestic creature deprived of his wings and physical prominence. "Goliath."  
  
"...Demona did this...?"  
  
He nodded again, "She probably caused all of this, the eruptions in time...everything. She tinkered and toyed and played with things she shouldn't have, and crafted from the little horror shop beneath her mansion a new Phoenix gate." He rubbed a bloodied hand across his bruised cheek. "Then she kicked me in the face."  
  
"Why...why would she...do this...?"  
  
"For Angela." he whispered, his brow drooping in respect to the fallen. "To bring her back...from the dead."  
  
The reality hit him as would a god smite a lesser being, and Goliath nearly collapsed under the sheer weight of his daughter's loss by Brooklyn's elusiveness, to spare him perhaps the words he longed never to hear. With Elisa stunned, the giant bowed his head and dribbled shaking talons through his hair, purring a growl into the passageway floor. He broke away from her and raised a fist to the doorway leading into the computer room, and with a single strike stimulated by his grief, ripped the door from its secured hydraulic track and did more in one blow than a contingent of Guild could not.  
  
Flames suddenly burst from the opened chamber, a compressed charge of ruby fire channeled into the hall, raising the ambient temperature by fifty degrees. Waiting for the flames to die down, Elisa crept around the shield of her husband and peeked inside. She deflected the enormous heat and light with her hand, and gasped at the sight of the entire computer control room ablaze. Her eyes were drawn towards the source, a succubus of golden steel indulging freely on the conduits broken by Demona's own hand, and feeding on the magical-imbued energy pouring into Wyvern's hub of control. The Phoenix gate had been drawn back to the richest source that gave it so much power, and threatened any who happen to be in its path. "Trinity!!" Elisa screamed, seeing her daughter in Nicole's arms, the duo stuck in a corner of the room behind a wall of pulsating mystical flame, a barrier high and deadly to traverse. "What the hell is that thing doing?!"  
  
"It's feeding, Elisa." answered Brooklyn, leaning up against the doorjamb, his eyes centered on and reflecting the talisman held within the nexus of fire. "It's not just a machine or medallion, it's a living, breathing thing, an entity to be respected...and feared."  
  
And indeed, with the infusion of Infiniti's energy giving life the myriad of technology and magical ingredients used in its construction, it was animate, and hungry.  
  
"...I have faced gods tonight..." said Goliath, his voice building into a proud rumble, scraped from the roof of his mouth by his rage. "...and paid for my very right to exist with a daughter...and some damnable trinket...will not risk another!!" Lumbering past Elisa and led by his sworn duty to protect overriding any safety concerns for himself, he lunged directly into the flames, and reached out for the gate and grabbed it, trying to pull it away from the machinery as his flesh burned and boiled.  
  
****************************************  
  
"Let's go! Move, move, move!!" he screamed, loading any Guild member into the heavy behemoths that would be fortunate enough to reach the castle edge. White pulled a wounded man into the cargo helicopter, one of five that touched down to Wyvern's exterior to load the survivors. They were weighted, and cumbersome enough to ward off the high winds and allow the Guild a secure retreat.  
  
The cannons were silent, as Mother found no need to further kill another, the battle interrupted by the temporal storm above. The Steel Clan and drones had been altered of their approach, defense rather than offense, and stood idle nearest the main castle structures. The Guild were retreating in droves, and the computer intelligence deemed her trial by fire and blood a successful test, if not for the fact her programming had conflicted with severe consequences. She had killed, despite her encoding otherwise.   
  
White had taken complete advantage of the castle intelligence's ceasefire, the only option now to withdraw without any major offensive weapons, or any weapon possible to defeat the new threat slowly dissolving their physical forms in violent cracks erupting throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum. "Is that all?!" he yelled to the last few men and women climbing into the safety of the cavernous cargo hold.  
  
"We think so..." a wounded woman answered, pulling the mask away from her face and rubbing tired eyes, having seen firsthand what she imagined the depths of hell. "It's an absolute mess out there...and we couldn't see anyone else."  
  
A hand suddenly clamped to the side of the door, and stopped it from closing. Black pushed his way inside, drenched and haggard from battle, and stood before a stunned White and an equally amazed troop. He pulled away his mask, and cast thinned, angered eyes towards his second, damnation unable to match the fire in his steeled glare. "We'll talk later."  
  
As the troop carriers nudged away from the castle, Black stood by the cargo bay door, slightly ajar, and gazed out towards the grouping of clan standing within the hole opened to the castle interior. Through the flashes of light, he found the child he had run away from, joining his comrades to watch his forces' retreat. They met eyes, and Black released a shaken breath, "Tell the pilot to get us the hell out of here..."  
  
****************************************  
  
The sky cracked, splitting from inside out with the massive wound to the timeline, and pieces fell, leaving holes of nothingness in the heavens. The portals widened, further injuring this time, collapsing without the strength to support itself under the crushing weight of so many realities bleeding atop it. The earth shook from the Eyrie foundation out, a whirlwind surrounding the entire spire and secreting lightning from its depths.  
  
The storm engulfed the entire tower, spreading outwards into the populace as a final, inevitable executioner to decide their fate.  
  
****************************************  
  
The Phoenix gate fed hungrily off the conduits, gorging on more of Infiniti's energy, and running fueled fire through every wire sautered and enchanted. A wave of energy expanded from it, the machine activating by its own accord the circuitry that controlled the doorways into every conceivable timeline. Flames curled vindictively around Goliath's flesh, the lavender giant trying to calm the wicked machine from its absorption of the very heart of Wyvern with his bare hands.  
  
Elisa reached through the flames towards Nicole and Trinity, seeing her daughter huddled into the reporter's arms, teary-eyed and screaming for her parents. She could not reach her, the flames eating at her leather jacket and exposed flesh. "TRINITY!!!"  
  
"Stay here." A flash of crimson filled Elisa's eyes, as Brooklyn swept past her and through the arcs of fire filling the entire room. Ignoring the excruciating pain numbing his entire side, he grabbed the reporter and covered both her and the tiny hybrid into the thick sheath of his wings. He made his way back through the swirls of orange and biting red, deflecting the sparks from his own skin and handed the child to her grateful mother, smothering the babe to her chest.  
  
The interruptions in time were growing fierce and closer together, but Goliath still struggled to pull the gate from its mooring of the main power conduits, his palms and forearms blistered by the intensity of the medallion's stubbornness. It was spreading fire to the computer banks, and knowing the power running through this room, and the fact it threatened to explode the equipment, he held on. But in its struggle to remain where it pleased, the gate lashed out with tendrils of flame, the circuitry triggered and sending streams of time-altering energy in every direction. "LEAVE!!!" he warned, as the gate hummed and vibrated.  
  
"Not without you!!" Elisa yelled out, as Brooklyn wasted no time in plucking an unconscious Fox from the ground and pulling both her and Nicole to safety through the bedlam of an inferno. "Goliath, let go!!"  
  
The lavender giant looked from behind his shoulder to see Brooklyn haul Fox and Nicole outside, and ensured of their safety he released from the gate, unable to hold his grasp any longer with his hands terribly burned, and hobbled towards Elisa and the doorway. She refused to leave him, as he lurched towards her through the deadly arcs of flame. Goliath approached with the best speed he could gather, and Elisa turned to lead him from the room.  
  
Brooklyn fell against the opposite wall in the corridor, with Fox and Nicole collapsing to the floor, one conscious to appreciate the pain from a daring rescue. He looked back to watch the Mazas at last reach the doorway, far too slow it seemed as the events unfolded. "Hurry up!!"  
  
The gate, unstable and overflowing with incompatible magicks, triggered, and opened a portal towards them, capturing the family and engulfing them within its power before they could escape. They evaporated in a stream of light, every molecule in their body shifting simultaneously from this timeline in a compressed stream of matter guided by the gate's desire alone. They completely disappeared along with the gilded medallion, just as the open conduits caught fire, and the delicate machinery, bleeding openly, overloaded and erupted. Almost the entire room was engulfed in an explosion that funneled into the hallway, a choking cloud of black smoke filling the halls.  
  
Brooklyn raised an arm against the blast, and screamed, "GOLIATH!!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
A tiny point of humanity within the expenditure of power beyond imagining, Alexander shed tears in pain, but held on, restoring a delicate balance as the column of his energy slowly swelled.  
  
The clan huddled together, taking strength in their bond, and meeting their fate as a family, one that faced oblivion and worse together. Desdemona clutched to Othello's chest, leaching tears onto his warm flesh and hoping her last memory would be of him. Lexington placed a hand to Angela's shoulder, Shadow kept his eyes trained on the storm, meeting death with eyes wide open, and MacBeth, he retreated into the folds of his jacket, and closed his eyes, hoping to die with dignity, and in a proverbial blaze of glory like any king would desire.  
  
****************************************  
  
Maria clutched tightly to the security that was Hudson, glad to face death if held for an eternity in his arms. She would never be alone again.  
  
****************************************  
  
Delilah rubbed a hand across the cloning tube that housed her child, a cluster of cells between her and a former lover fused by the spark of life. The promise of procreation a testimony she was more than the barren experiment she deemed herself.  
  
****************************************  
  
Todd looked up, his mind in turmoil, questions of his past and future colliding as he closed his eyes, and filled his thoughts with gilded strands of silk, of a smile, a face, a buxom form etched in his memories. And the end of the known universe would not take him without a cocky smile.  
  
****************************************  
  
Sata kneeled beside Broadway, each thinking of their mate, the burly gargoyle male huddled and crying into the rain, fading fast. He would be reunited with Angela soon, it seemed, and he prepared himself for death. His body was dissolving in a stream of particles, becoming purest light, a rebirth as conscious energy.  
  
****************************************  
  
Engulfed in the smoke streaming from the computer room, Brooklyn huddled on the ground, nursing his torn side wet and numbed by pain. In the wake of the explosion and his own impending demise, he thought of his family, and more importantly his clan. He wondered now, as his skin peeled from his soul, if he had indeed failed them all.  
  
****************************************  
  
The boy whimpered as the strain on his abilities threatened to reach beyond what he could give, but held on, the universe cringing at the sheer amount of power released. Every creature across this planet attuned in such magic shivered in their final moments, hearing inside their minds the pained cry of a young boy unwilling to have his family hurt in any way.  
  
The entire city was preparing for the end, perhaps the entire world, for in one instant all were equal in an impending death through one simple, irrational act, guided by pain and the hope of resurrection. The cracks spread outwards, breaking apart the very fabric of reality, with one small, special boy trapped within the nexus of every timeline intersecting into one and creating more energy from the merging than the birth of the universe billions of years ago.  
  
The light intensified, it engulfed the entire castle in pure white, like fresh snow, comforting and serene and chaotic all at once. It swelled across the entire island in a spherical wave, expanding across the city, the entire Eastern coast and beyond, and for an instant in time, nothing in this entire reality remained.  
  
But silent white.  
  
****************************************  
  
From nothingness, came subsistence, slowly leaked into the void of matter and sound and color, and fading to the menagerie of life's enduring rhythm.  
  
A gentle rain fell to the stones, warm, refreshing, trailing across each fitted seam and forging a thousand paths towards the curving battlement edges. It was silent save for the touch of floating water against the damaged cornices, a moderate hymn being crooned in a champagne soprano, frothy and crisp. Smoke rose from the scorched parapets, castle Wyvern soundless, and almost whole.  
  
The storms had cleared, leaving a mournful lavender gray to hide the stars and bring a light, cleansing rain. The cracks sealed, reality remained unchanged and intact, though volatile from such damage suffered, the lasting mewls of thunder blanketing the distant horizons more than an ominous warning.  
  
A moving figure dropped suddenly from the air and onto the stones in the middle of the battle-ravaged courtyard, a spatter of emerald green sprayed outwards and dispersed. Alexander dropped on his haunches, uncaring of the water soaking through his pants. He was exhausted, drained and empty. The child had tied almost all of the broken threads together, and prevented eternity from bursting upon this world with a lesson successfully learned from his mother, a double knot.  
  
With the brunt of the damage repaired, he had pulled every loose time string without an end into one singular point, creating an open wound, a nexus of temporal energy hovering a foot above the stones to his far right, and left to hopefully slowly close on its own.  
  
The child's eyelids drooped, and Alexander collapsed into an unconscious heap of designer children's clothing and swaddled strands of ruby red, a waft of smoke bred from his mouth and eyes.  
  
****************************************  
  
He pulled back the armored wings of the Epsilon, peeking out from the sails of black titanium to see death, to prod the specter for authenticity of his demise. His hand waved past his eyes, and clenched into a ball, the sensation of touch essential to ensure he was actually intact. Feeling the substance of rain tumble down his face, he gingerly tested the air in front of him to be sure of his continued existence. "Well," Todd started, a sudden rush of breath allowed at last through his lungs, "I don't know about you guys, but I'd be checking your shorts for cake." He drifted a suspicious gaze around him, as the gargoyles once holed in their protective crook lifted into the gentle rains. "Are we missing any vital body parts?"  
  
Lexington quickly scoured his gleaming metallic form to detect any damage. "I'm not, thank god, these parts are hard to replace."  
  
He chuckled, and teased his taloned fingers across the small patch of circuitry on his forehead, deadened by the bolt of lightning that could have killed him as well. "Well how's that for a kick in the balls?" Todd muttered mournfully. "We survived."  
  
Desdemona ran a hand up Othello's arm, his flesh though torn and battered, but as exactly as she remembered. She smiled. "It would seem we are whole, Mr. Hawkins." Her eyes wavered on her mate for an instant before dropping to a miraculously rescued Angela, still confused in her predicament and the center of attention. "All of us."  
  
The daughter of Goliath set into place an angered brow, trying if anything to ward off the thankful if not disturbing glares, as if they were examining her, and discerning whether or not this was indeed the genuine article. "I believe someone skipped ahead a few chapters without me..." she whispered, standing with Shadow's aid, and fixing her shredded tunic dress as best she could to maintain an important visage of poise. "I am swept into Shadow's arms, spirited away through some kind of glowing portal and then experience the pleasant sensation of having my flesh melt from my consciousness." Her eyes darted upwards into the clouds, now bereft of their destructive power and returned to a sense of normalcy, almost eerie in the sudden transformation. "May I please demand with the appropriate tone just what is happening without coming off as a complete and total bitch?"  
  
Lexington approached this topic with due care. "You don't remember three bullets passing through your guts?"  
  
"Are you saying I died?"  
  
"The actuality of death is only in the eye of the beholder." MacBeth breathed coolly, stowing his guns beneath the folds of his duster. "Though every beat of yuir heart right now proves otherwise, we all watched you die, and what we saw canna be disputed."  
  
"But how...?" Angela whispered. "I was not injured, I was hurt in any life threatening way..."  
  
The ancient king wicked a droplet of rain from his sterling brow with the edge of his gloved thumb, and stroked his beard curled around the veiled smile. "Dying is not such a big deal everyone makes it out t' be."  
  
Angela stiffed her brows, holding out her hands to the cynics still staring at her unusually "I am here, I am flesh, and I am alive! Can you not see this?"  
  
"Perhaps you should inquire of the man whose arms held you while you took your last breath."  
  
She looked across the courtyard by Othello's prompt, where the damage wrought against their ancestral home was impressive, but as always repairable. Where bodies lay in the wake of battle, humans plucked from the populace and swept into a war with an enthralling call to duty now dead for their trouble and misguided gallantry. A distant corner held a huddled mass, mourning the loss of his mate with sufficient time to grieve after the world seemed not to end as he expected. "Broadway?"  
  
Slowly removing his hands from over his face, he looked up and turned to the voice. Broadway craned over his shoulder around from Sata's offered arm, and his gaze lethargically trickled the courtyard towards a lone figure somewhat blurred by the rain. The hourglass silhouette so familiar, so indistinct it appeared a delusion brought on by his demanding battle with the past Goliath. "Angela?" The burly behemoth started a brisk pace in seeing the mirage of a lover come miraculously back to life, expecting the image to fade, and dissipate between the clutch of his hands when close. He stopped in front of her, and timidly touched to her offered hand, and thus, the image did not lighten or evaporate. He threw her into his arms, and the two lovers embraced in the rain, Broadway eagerly, desperately guiding his hands to every part of her body, to make a fading memory genuine once more. "Oh god...Angela..." Giddy, relieved and dazed, he muffled a response into the lush mane of sable falling across his lips, "But you died...you died in my arms..."  
  
She pulled back, to witness tears obscured by the rains. To sway his fears, she roamed her talons across his cheek, to show him she was indeed not a figment of a head injury, or sudden fantasy spurred by the trauma of the end of the world. "I did no such thing."  
  
He pressed her close, using his wings to enclose her completely, to better make her a part of him. "I felt your heart stop under my palm...felt your cold body against my chest..."  
  
"I pulled her from one of the portals just before she was killed." Shadow explained when coming upon the lovers. "It is conceivable that this is not YOUR Angela."  
  
MacBeth harrumphed, solving an intricate puzzle. "You're a counterpart, lass." he announced quickly, much to the mated couple's surprise. "One Angela among a trillion."  
  
"But then where...?" Broadway turned to where he had abandoned his mate upon the stones, to a crumpled, howling figure wailing and damning all eternity. "...is my Angela..."  
  
Demona clenched to the still body with all her strength, crying into the sodden strands released from their binding and splayed across her daughter's corpse, a shroud of woodland satin. Unhinged, angered, and cheated even when devastating the very laws of nature, it seemed the limit to what her already precarious sanity would allow. "I offered all of eternity if but for one single life...her life..." she whispered, looking up towards the blanket of cloud, and whatever force beyond that constantly endured her life with pain. "I offered to end all the mistakes spawned from my own! I offered myself, in return for her! Why did you not want it...?" She fell her head into the cleft of Angela's neck, crying, searching for any warmth in the inanimate flesh, and sobbing for her daughter. "I can't even die when pitifully mortal..."  
  
"Mother." Angela encouraged, the living Angela, from behind.  
  
Demona snapped her head around to the cry, and the sheer concurrence of another Angela appearing from behind jolted her from the corpse. Wide-eyed and hysterical, almost mad, Demona stumbled away, desperate to escape this apparition now haunting her. "No...you're not real!!" she screamed, lurching across the stones and desperate to escape from the haunting image.  
  
Angela stared down to her own dead body, an unsettling scene for anyone even of a stronger resolve, the lavender female's chest opened and coated in blood, her jaw slack, her flesh cold and sterile. "This is not me." Angela followed her mother's shaken path, an arm extended. "Mother, please, that empty shell is not me!"  
  
"No!!" Demona continued in her delusion, fallen from the brink of perception and entrapped in her own pain and a fabricated reality. "You're a fragment of what's left of her soul, nothing more!! A ghost..."  
  
Angela leapt towards her mother, and grabbed her hands around the hysterical woman's wrists. "Feel my warmth, and every beat of my heart!!" She shook her resistant mother, to better display her tangibility, and prove beyond any doubt she was indeed of her blood, not an easy task considering this Angela was a counterpart among an infinite brood strung across the wastes of conceivable reality. "I am no spirit!!"  
  
"NO!!!" Demona howled, breaking away from and snarling at the image that dared to wear her daughter's face. "Stay away from me!! You're dead and dust!!" Insanity reigned, having broken Demona's already volatile balance as her eyes lit up in crimson. "DEAD AND DUST!!!"  
  
****************************************  
  
"...dead and dust...dead and dust..." A swirl of light and the tang of local sedatives filtered through the air, white tile and pulsing machines reflecting off a glassy concaved surface that held eerily constant, and never blinking. Demona's eyes stared off into the distant infirmary wall, wide and frenzied, the gargoyle shivering and nearly comatose. "...my beautiful daughter is but a ghost...wandering aimlessly the halls..." Curled into a fetal position on a far stretcher and clutching to the sterile sheets for any sense of comfort in her severely disconnected state, she babbled incoherently, a string of lexis thrown together, of pleas and repentance and a want for death. And a restless spirit unwilling to allow her peace to her pain. "...dead and dust..."  
  
"Mother?" Methodically stroking her talons through her mother's hair, Angela stood vigil by Demona's side, witness to one of the most powerful influences in her life reduced to a crying, blathering whelp. "Mother, it's me...I'm here." she whispered calmly, soothingly. "I'm real, and alive. Please..."  
  
"...she tries to speak to me...she won't let me sleep..." Demona huddled into her hands and took refuge in the blankets, shaking, and deranged. "...I want to sleep..."  
  
Angela sighed, as any attempt to break through the shattered mental condition proved useless, a wall erected to shelter the cerulean-skinned now preventing any connection from daughter to mother, no matter how slight. And she wondered, if truly this was her mother, and this realm her world. She had come from another thread, stolen between two lines scraping against each other for but a few moments in time. She was already wary of her surroundings, eyeing surreptitiously each clan member gathered into the Eyrie hospital as if to examine them for any differences drastic or subtle.  
  
Broadway stood behind her, draping his mate in generous, aquamarine wings, to ensure he would never feel the absence of her warm skin upon his. He too sensed the odd change in Angela's scent, just barely off to make him doubt. But now, here, she was alive, and whole, and brimming with life as opposed to the corpse assigned a number and tray in the Eyrie morgue, along with the rest of the dead Guild members unable to be retrieved by their brethren in the rapid retreat. Some of those dead by his own hands, and the very remembrance of their blood spattered across his hands gave rise to a shudder passing down his spine. But he swallowed his remorse, to better concentrate on what came through the battle unscathed. He was fortunate, they both were, to be given a second chance no matter the circumstance of her resurrection.  
  
"No survivors."  
  
Broadway looked up from the bedded matron to another stretcher across from him, where Brooklyn engaged in a whispered conversation with his own mate, Sata ensuring his bandages were tucked tight to contain the bleeding from his wound. To salve the injury for the break of day, and a healing slumber.  
  
"The morgue's overflowing with a hundred and three Guild bodies, which leaves no trace to their whereabouts." the new Wyvern leader continued, as Sata busied herself in her work, unwilling to link their respective gaze. It was as if she did not want to relinquish any of the anger held by the insurrection he staged to dethrone Goliath, by power of his ever-hypnotic charm cast in black marble. "Our newly reborn sister's dead, Demona's completely traumatized and almost comatose, Mother is barely functioning, the main computer room's a disaster along with the castle exterior and a quarter of the island, Sobek's disappeared somewhere into this city, Owen's missing...as are Goliath, Elisa and Trinity..." He shook his head and craned his neck to look over the hospital filled with wounded, and the overhead televisions bursting with news reports of the chasm in downtown Manhattan, and the substantial loss of life continually mounting with every body unearthed. The lingering pain in his side served as a cruel reminder, to the burden of leadership he had willingly undertaken by force. "My first outing as leader has turned out to be one hell of a damned mess."  
  
"The point is moot." said the samurai hardheartedly, but with a purpose behind her severity of tone. "Your uncertainties are a waste of breath and thought. You now have a responsibility to this clan that cannot be skirted." She decided to raise her eyes, to fight stubborn fire against alluring ice. "Yes, we have suffered grievously, but to falter now would only ensure our conquest. You have assumed a grave responsibility, Brooklyn-san," she cocked her brow to frame her almond-shaped eyes, and cupped his face with her hand to press her lips to his cheek, "be sure you do not fall short." Having nestled her mouth into the crook where his ear sloped smoothly from the etched austerity of his beaked jaw, she whispered, "In your youth, do you remember a battle with a certain jade swordswoman just before the massacre?"  
  
Brooklyn looked quizzically at her, an unusual question under any circumstance. "No, why?"  
  
Partially satisfied the timeline had not been altered in any significant method, she pulled back, and disguised any hint of a smile in the pleasure of channeling the brunt of her anger into a singular blow wrought a thousand years hence. "You deserved it." She slapped an admonishing hand across his wound, and took her leave, passing by another wearing her mate's crimson shade, dulled and blended with a hint of emerald. Her daughter.  
  
Ariana approached cautiously, fearful of this encounter. "Mom, I'm sorry." she whispered repentantly, sheepishly staring to the floor and fiddling with her hands in a nervous gesture. "But, I thought I should make up my own mind about..."  
  
"You are not old enough to have a mind of your own!" Sata seethed in true motherly fashion, cowing her daughter into an obedient silence. "Not until I say so. You are a young girl, not yet a woman. And you cannot even fathom what your decision may hold for the future, or how delicate this clan and our relationship with the world we live in truly is. And until you mature and experience the depths of pain and passion life can award, and truly earn the right to make such a decision that impacts not just yourself but an entire clan, your decisions are best kept to yourself." Sata lessened the glacial tone that practically breathed ice into the warmed air, and tipped a talon underneath her daughter's chin to raise her eyes. "Grow up, then you may approach me on more equal terms and test my patience on every decision from apparel to mating, but not before."  
  
Having witnessed the conversation, and duly impressed by his sister's bravery, Graeme sidled next to his sister when Sata roamed to another part of the infirmary. "How pissed is she?"  
  
Ariana brushed away from her brow and cheek a wave of delicate strands, and tucked them back behind her ear, a trembling breath released. "Her pupils were throbbing."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Fox. Fox, can you hear me?"  
  
She lifted the darkened haze from her sight, blurred, intense, and far too white for any sense of comfort. The gentle voice lured her from the void of unconsciousness, her body weak, and starved. Fox stirred, her hand clenching within her husband's entwined fingers. "...uhnnn...David..."  
  
The billionaire carved marble features in his best version of a smile, cupping his hands completely over her own and feasting upon pale, sickly flesh, but bursting with her distinctive savor. "I'm here, wildfire."  
  
She licked parched lips, full and dry and thirsting for liquid. "...what happened...?"  
  
He handed her a glass of water, and helped her to drink. "You lost consciousness in the computer room, and missed one hell of a show."  
  
She crooned an irritated sigh in the fact her sickness had overcome her strength of will, having been aggravated by the most inane of sources, the reporter. "...damn..." She felt movement to her side, a weighted lump of flesh on her opposite flank shifting. She moved her left hand into a field of fire silk colored bright red, a familiar texture and length. Her eyes beamed when discovering she was drifting her fingers through her son's hair, the child resting comfortably against his mother's side atop the hospital sheets. "...alex..."  
  
"My genes could not be more proud of what they procreated." Xanatos whispered, crossing his eyes to a small boy exhausted, and drifting in and out of slumber. "Our son saved the world, no less than what I would have expected from a Xanatos just short of his sixth birthday." His hand reached over the immobile form of his wife, and as soon as he made contact, Alexander awoke and flinched, quickly pulling away.  
  
The child knew, if not only possessing a rather acute sense of his father's extramural affairs. He knew the castle's energy patterns had become more erratic since a few hours ago, owing to an anomalous presence that now spiked the once free-flowing tide having returned to some semblance of normal. He curled as close to his mother as possible, his eyes never leaving his father's, and the blame inherent let off like fire, and accordingly, Xanatos dropped his hand away.  
  
From another bunk, Lexington sat up, having watched the entire exchange between father and son. "Maybe he senses something we don't, Xanatos." he quipped, bringing the entire infirmary to a muted whisper. Shadow turned from where Delilah was tending to his injuries, and Hudson and Maria, Othello and Desdemona, all were watching, and waiting. "Maybe it's the fact there were Guild helicopters in one of your warehouses. Or how the defensive shield was suddenly disarmed!" His eyes disappeared under a lowered brow, seeping light from his electronic pupils. "Or that you abandoned us in the middle of the battle!!"  
  
As composed as ever, Xanatos simply straightened his suit jacket, maintaining the icy facade under Lexington's scrutiny, even the web-wing's stare enough to goad a thin sheen of sweat against any other's brow. "Why there were intruders in one of my thousands of warehouses across the planet is still a mystery I intend to solve. And the defensive shield must have malfunctioned when under the command of Mother's overburdened programming. As for my sudden withdrawal from the battle..." His eyes settled back on his son and wife, one angered, and one confused. "I had interests to protect."  
  
"Interests more important than our lives?!"  
  
Xanatos narrowed steeled eyes of iron gray, knowing all concerned were waiting for such an answer. "You have no idea."  
  
A prevarication he perhaps expected, Lexington hopped from the bed, only to be halted in place by Brooklyn's hand on his shoulder.  
  
"Lex, no." he commanded quickly, unwilling to escalate this beyond what he could control. "Expend your energy to where it's needed. Like finding out what the hell that thing is out there on the courtyard."  
  
"But..."  
  
Brooklyn's hand tightened on his brother's shoulder, a plea perhaps to allow him to handle this. "Go, I'll join you shortly." Lexington sulked off and out of the infirmary, allowing his brother to step up and match against Xanatos. "Until I can prove without a doubt the failure of the shield and the Guild holing up in one of your warehouses were exactly as you say, you're off the hook. But if I find that you have indeed betrayed us, Xanatos," he leaned in, face to face with the billionaire and breaths merged into one heated wind, "you'll wish you never found castle Wyvern crumbling and covered in Scottish vine, and instead spent your money on something more befitting a decadent socialite such as yourself."  
  
"Far be it for me to continually remind your clan of what they owe to my curiosity of an old urban legend," Xanatos spit back, "but every single one of you would still be either decaying statues or restless spirits if not for my 'decadence'. As would Goliath, even if his eventual resurrection would lead to his obliteration by that blast..."  
  
"Goliath isn't dead!!" Brooklyn growled, choosing to believe against the common thought and rumor that the computer room explosion did indeed kill the Maza family. "Nor are Elisa and Trinity! The three of them are out there somewhere, wherever the gate decided to take them!"  
  
"Four." Alexander whispered, quickly garnering the clan's attention to amend Brooklyn's statement. "Elisa has a baby in her."  
  
It seemed to work. Along with the entire room, a surprise expressed in muted gasps and melancholy smiles, Dr. Pierce succumbed as well, nearly jabbing the needle far too deeply into Othello's skin. The huntsman winced and growled in pain, with the doctor grimacing and pulling tenderly the needle from its embedding into the thick, leathery flesh before he suffer a comparable fate.  
  
"What?!" Brooklyn shoved past Xanatos and ignoring the pain from his torso, rushed to Alexander's side, leaning over him. "Squirt, are you absolutely sure?" he asked, his tone necessitating of a definite reply as he brushed away the boy's hair to better link their equally powerful gaze. "Is Elisa pregnant?"  
  
Intimidated by Brooklyn's brisk approach and stance, he nodded, clutching tighter to his mother's frame. "Uh huh."  
  
As the leader moved back, the joyous news received by a subdued terror, his mate behind him whisked a hand across her ridges, sweeping loose tendrils of silk away from a knitted brow. "Oh shit."  
  
Dr. Pierce wrinkled his eyebrows beneath the long falling strands, and like the others who had not danced through time, could not fathom the disastrous result of magical energy consuming a fetal lifeform so unprepared to defend itself. "Pardon me for acting the idiot here," he interjected, "but considering she just beat the odds at an almost inconceivable conception again, why is her pregnancy considered ominous?"  
  
Sata shook her head and crossed her arms beneath her chest. Her eyes when lifted were wild, and intense, a consuming black wavering. "You don't understand, if this Phoenix gate is like the other, and if Elisa is exposed to its magic for too long...her baby will die...and so will she..."  
  
****************************************  
  
They unloaded, and those gathered around them, their brethren, expecting a triumphant contingent instead found remnants of the best their ranks had to offer, two thirds of the Guild force limping from the cargo helicopters on the shoulders of their friends, some on stretchers, and a few even close to death. It was a scene obscenely converse to their hopes of victory, of an assured safety for their families and friends dashed by the monsters having torn their chosen champions apart. Though the gargoyles had only defended themselves for their very right to exist, the humans in this hangar did not see it that way.  
  
Black skipped from the corpulent belly of the last helicopter to land within the Guild's vast hangar staging area, their base a massive, sprawling bunker hidden from every conceivable enforcement agency by way of their benefactor.  
  
"We got several fractures and multiple lacerations!! Prep for immediate surgery!"  
  
He waded through the crowd of medical personnel, watching each wounded soldier loaded onto stretchers and carted off towards the infirmary, and the doctors shout orders to their swarm of underlings.  
  
"Keep his neck immobile! The last thing we want is a quadriplegic on our hands!"   
  
Moaning and blood, a noise and scent fused into a memory come back to haunt him like so many others tonight, so much so he desired to escape. From the yearning eyes of his home-based legion, questioning silently what went so wrong in a time of assured conquest. Of his soldiers having survived the battle and made it back home, and his command to retreat, not for the damaged timeline wreaking havoc through their ranks, but for one, young man that threatened the sincerity of his entire past and that pain which built and forged an empire, risen from the ashes of a failed experiment.  
  
"Subdural hematoma and he's bleeding into his stomach! Move, move!!"  
  
He escaped. He pushed his way through the expectant crowd, the administrative staff wanting orders for such insignificant things as weapon replenishment and personnel relocation to fill the gaps left by the dead. He waved them off, slapping a young woman's clipboard to the cold cement, scaring her with such a brutal act. "Just ensure those men and woman survive." he growled, and they halted their chase, allowing Black to leave unburdened through a far door.  
  
White followed, unimpressed by his leader's pretense. Through the winding halls of the near-subterranean command center, where the workforce parted to allow the two most influential men to pass unimpeded and unbothered, he pursued. Even through the guarded door leading into Black's private chamber, a womb of monitors and computers, and a literal heart from where to control every aspect of the Guild.  
  
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" he accused first, slamming the door behind him as Black slumped both hands onto his desk. "Our first attack, and what should have been by all rights our last, was jeopardized by your single order otherwise!!"  
  
The Guild leader seemed unaffected. "There will be other opportunities. Plenty of time to kill the monsters."  
  
"We lost over a hundred men and women and two attack helicopters in a useless exercise that ultimately failed! We should have blown that goddamned castle from its moorings from a comfortable distance in the first place!"  
  
"And thus, we would celebrate by sipping Château Loudenne as the entire Eyrie building collapsed and pulverized an entire city block and beyond in a rain of fire, steel and stone. How gallant of humanity's last resort." Block scoffed at White's recklessness, suckling a fresh breath of re-circulated air into his lungs. "I think this city has suffered enough tonight, don't you think?" He pulled tautly the edges of his gloves, ensuring the black leather was stretched form-fittingly to his hands, and powered up a few more of the screens making the entirety of this chamber, every channel a different news report on the rescue efforts. "Our benefactor will re-supply our lost equipment, and the population of New York will produce more willing to take the place of those who died for our cause. Even more so with the attack by those things." He turned, the dimmed screens of the chamber reflecting a glassy fire against the white of his eyes, vengeful and angry at his commands being counteracted with such destructive apathy. He brushed aside the thought of White trying to wrest control of his dominion, deciding to better award his second in command's intelligence in not actually daring to try. "You on the other hand, agent White, went against my explicit orders. You could have killed innocents out there in your insular methods!"  
  
White stepped forward, standing against the force that was the enigmatic Mr. Black. "The Eyrie building is a proven nest! And since when have you placed safety of a few over the safety of an entire race?!"  
  
"We protect the innocent! We don't endanger them, we don't let our war with these creatures affect their normal lives in any way!" He lifted from the desk, and pointed a gloved finger towards the slimmer man, ensuring his point to be absolutely patent. "One more infraction and I'll be looking to rearrange the command structure of this organization. Is that clear?!"  
  
He sneered, the expression lost in the weak light. "Perfectly, sir." His eyes though thinned. "Why'd you pull us out? It wasn't just those flashes, it was something else..."  
  
Exhausted features suddenly fell, toppled by a past brought back in a tidal wave of crippling, weakening emotion. "HE was there, inside that suit of armor we met near the infirmary." Black explained, the boy's face a new version alongside the old. "I couldn't kill him...even if he has allied himself with the creatures, I just couldn't kill him..."  
  
"Who?"  
  
Black smiled wistfully. "He has his mother's will...he's so young...barely over twenty and he's already a soldier..."  
  
White could not readily believe it, that his leader had tried to halt their victory over the most craven of excuses. A weakness in the once-thought impenetrable steel skin, a crack opened by something he would never have expected. "You retreated from our most decisive battle because of some goddamned boy?!"  
  
Black immediately rushed him, grabbing the other man by the collar of his suit and ramming him against the opposite wall with enough pressure against his neck to fracture bone. "That boy...!!" His eyes held an explosion, of a progeny almost lost, and now within his grasp. "...is my son."  
  
****************************************  
  
Breaching the great distance now between father and son, they shared a personal tragedy each contained within a family, uncovered from the dust of the past long left behind them in a quest for a new future. Todd watched from a darkened corner a prone form lay peacefully under the Eyrie hospital sheets, bandaged and healed, the hole in her belly successfully stitched up in the midst of war. Out of surgery, Rose rested in a once-fitful slumber, the sedatives having calmed feverish dreams wracked by the pain of her ailing body. Every weakened breath he could hear, every gulp for fresh oxygen to feed her lungs was a struggle, and damned if he did not feel sorry for her, the woman who abandoned him.  
  
He noticed MacBeth to her side, holding a vigil for reasons only assumed by the young man but in truth unknown, the ancient king slumped into a large chair along the hospital stretcher and buried comfortably in the black folds of his duster. He nursed his prize from battle, his only solicited recompense for chancing his mortality a steaming cup of coffee freshly brewed and flavored with amaretto. And Todd only allowed him here in the fact he had indeed risked his life for the clan, and his claimed family. The young man descended back into his thoughts, using the shadows of the darkened infirmary as a blanket, of either warmth or isolation, it suited his mood.  
  
Beside him, movement, as a figure shifted her weight and roused his attention. Todd looked over to Annika, sprawled beside him on the hospital bench seat and leaning on his side, her legs tucked up underneath her, her wings drooped lazily over her shoulders and her tail drifting back and forth, the tip a pendulum against the infirmary linoleum. She was tired, and fading in and out of a blurred sleep even less than an hour before the coming dawn, exhausted from hours of surgery and facing off against a relentless Guild member out for her blood. She had performed beyond any expectation, and Todd was thankful for the capable, resilient creature that was his wife.  
  
He leaned into the strands of golden silk lying across his shoulder, and for the first time for an hour, altered the scowl he wore into a slight smile. She stirred, and adjusted her makeshift berth against his shoulder, fluttering long lashes swept over ocean sapphire.  
  
A robed figure approached him across the glossy tile, the stains upon a favored lab coat indicative to the owner. Pierce hovered over Todd, daring to intrude on his reverie to bring him news of his mother. "The surgery was successful, Mr. Hawkins," he whispered, careful to keep his voice down in this room where the healing lay dormant, but enough to sufficiently rouse Annika to Todd's side, "I was able to repair all of Sobek's damage to her internal organs. She suffered extensive internal injuries but I'm confident she'll pull through...though she may hurt for a while."  
  
He nodded to the doctor's report, mechanical in his acceptance of the information.  
  
"Your mother is a survivor." the good doctor continued, flipping through her medical status chart and oblivious to the expression that swiftly soured Todd's features. "I'm starting her on an antibiotic morphine drip for pain and any possible infection, and..."  
  
"She's not my mother." Todd cut him off, a growl of anger, of abandonment making the boisterous man a darker creature himself.  
  
Oblivious indeed. "I've compared her blood to your sample on file, Todd," Pierce stressed, "she is your biological mother."  
  
Annika drifted closer to her husband, the resentment he contained so stubbornly sending visible tremors through his hands. "Todd..." she tried, and for naught.  
  
"She's not my mother!!" he screamed back, hauling himself from the bench and facing off against an anxious wife and doctor. "My mother died twenty years ago in that car crash." Growling from deep within his chest, he pointed towards Rose's bed, where MacBeth stood up to better examine just what the commotion was. "The woman in that bed abandoned me in an orphanage, and then when she finally decides to come back, she lies to me my entire goddamned life!" He backed away, sneering, revulsion and pain etched into his features, staring callously towards Rose's sleeping form as he slinked from the hospital. "She's not my mother," his disembodied voice trailed, the last remnant as the young man disappeared into the hall, "and never will be."  
  
As Pierce threw his hands into the air and muttered something unintelligible as he walked away, Annika sighed and rubbed her head to ease the stress of the recent events. "Hell of a family to bring you into," she slid a hand over her stomach, "huh, kiddo?"  
  
****************************************  
  
She emerged from the rubble, lifting nearly a ton of debris away with a single hand. She was dazed, and bewildered beyond the capacity to speak coherently. In the chaos of blaring sirens and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles finally allowed access to the damaged section of Manhattan, it was a blurred, anarchic frenzy of light and noise and rain that prompted her to seek shelter from the seekers themselves. The rescue parties were dark figures against the intensity of their searchlights, strafing their flashlight beams throughout the rain-distorted darkness and endangering her anonymity, and knowing her unclothed and gilded skin would reflect an errant stream of illumination she rabbited.  
  
Guided by instinct alone, and the ancient preservation of any wounded animal facing a predator, she fled, sweeping away the debris of the building that had toppled upon her by using her enhanced strength and the golden steel sheath wrapped around her. Towards the nearest, darkest corner, she stumbled and lurched and dodged into an alleyway and found refuge at last, even from those who were hard-pressed to rescue any and all survivors.  
  
The clever sister huddled with folded wings around her naked body in the dampened corridor, a coursing breath running fast and hard through her lungs as the searching cries of rescue workers exploded from the light-filled chasm and eventually faded into the distance. She trailed backwards, guided by her hand against the brick wall enclosing this narrow dead-end, a place of refuse and abandonment, and unbeknownst to the clever sister, a home.  
  
A muffled gasp turned her attention around, to onlookers emerging from the debris and dismemberment of this forsaken alleyway. Her eyes blinked, having stumbled upon a crowd of humans cowering near the other end, gathering what remnants of their makeshift home that were not pulverized by either the gods' rampage or the storm's fury.  
  
An older man stepped forwards, a broken plank wielded as a weapon, and though useless against the sister's steel skin, she nonetheless heeded his intent to defend his homeless brood. "What are you?!"  
  
She stood silent, centering on the weapon lashing before her, a thousand computations running simultaneously, on disarmament, escape, or even pacification. But in her confusion, and the fact she could not meld these ideas together into a single action caused her hesitation. A hand examined the throbbing pain centered on her brow, trailing across a large concave in her forehead's steel skin, an indentation from the several tons of broken girders collapsing atop her.  
  
"Shush, Holden." came a softer, more yielding voice from the group. They parted, in almost a silent respect to an older, shorter woman draped in tattered rags and a thick woolen shawl, to better protect her from the ills of urban living. "Can't you see she's scared?"  
  
"What if she's one of those things that tore apart the city?!" the man protested once more, and pointed to the makeshift dwelling at the far end of the alley. "And our home?!"  
  
The old woman merely smiled to her impetuous friend and waved him off, daunting the man and forcing his compliance. "This timid thing?" She approached, her step as soft as her demeanor, her voice, and her eyes, like melting crystals gleaming from beneath the lines in her flesh, each denoting a year of hardship. "Nah, she's got good eyes, and she wouldn't be running scared from the search and rescue parties if she had indeed been 'one of those things'."  
  
Holden as he was known scoffed and held himself ready, even as the older woman approached the glimmering creature.  
  
Her hand extended, the ragged woman steadily moved closer, though smart, and cautious. "Who are you?"  
  
She tilted her head, her brain reforming sufficient neural connections to heal a needed speech center. "Query: unknown." she replied, coldly, a mechanical voice to match her evolved exterior. "Cognitive functions damaged, long-term/short-term memory retrieval directives damaged, unable to reply without sufficient data. Identity: unknown." The absence of her memories frightened her, unearthing the soul from beneath the layers of technology inherent in her resurrection. "My identity," she whispered, her voice now her own and not of the cold metal, and frightened, "...is unknown..."  
  
"It's gotta be one of those gargoyle things..." whispered one from the background.  
  
"Gargoyle?" the sister tested the word apprehensively.  
  
The older woman approached in seeing the confusion race through her eyes, and reached out, but held steady when the sister flinched at the contact. She resumed her exploration of the lustrous skin colored a brilliant gold when having gained a modicum of the creature's trust. She rubbed the hollow in the gargoyle's forehead, and scrunched her features as if she could wholly empathize with the female's disorientation and pain. "Whatever you are, you're hurt," she whispered, "and I don't think you should be running around this broken burg stark naked with a dent in your head." Pulling the shawl from around her shoulders, she draped it onto the nude, golden gargoyle, who indeed welcomed the gift if not required for warmth, but comfort in her uncertainty. "Come with me, dearie." the woman prompted, offering a weary smile amongst the folds of age etched into her parched skin. "We'll keep you safe. We'll protect you."  
  
"Protect." she echoed, welcoming the woman's generosity, and scanning the crowd now come to examine closer the newest member to their family. "Yes, protect."  
  
****************************************  
  
"Anomaly appears to be a focal point with a funnel-shaped nexus, breeding immense energies, most of which are beyond my sensors' abilities to fully classify. It contains no substance, but is registering as a solid entity to all methods of scanning technologies available at my present operating capacity."  
  
"So in other words, a massive gash in space and time."  
  
Mother nodded to Brooklyn's urban if not rudimentary generalization. "Yes."  
  
"Alex's fault, probably." Lexington answered, hunched in front of the portal near its orifice, his laptop connected to Mother's scanners, and in turn, led by an umbilical into the cybernetic implant port on his neck. "He told me he wasn't able to fix every 'string' as he called them, and grabbed a hold of all the others and simply tied them together, which in turn created this portal as a substandard mending of the damage caused by Demona's killing of her younger self...or at least a version of her younger self...I think..." He rubbed his brow. "Temporal mechanics is hard to understand even for genius-level intelligence." He looked up, into the swirl of energy nearly eight feet high, a perfect circular shape hovering across the stones on the southern side of the castle's courtyard. Beautiful, and oddly serene in its pulsing rhythm, if not a window into any reality dangerously unknown, and thus, a vulnerability to the castle's security and the occupants' lives. "Anyway, according to the latest theories, it most likely intersects all those broken strings without ends into one massive junction leading into hundreds, maybe thousands of parallel, alternative realities."  
  
"So, Wyvern's now an intergalactic crossroad." Brooklyn muttered. "Great. Is this thing open on the other end? Will we expect visitors anytime soon?"  
  
Mother's hologram, just recently restored, looked towards the portal. "Unknown. It depends if such universes that lead into ours have an equally utilizable method of traversing through this portal."  
  
"And can we close it?"  
  
"That might be more dangerous than anything else." Lexington answered, his computer readings beyond any discernable limit. "The energy readings are off the scale. I couldn't even hazard a guess how to close a rift in space and time at all, let alone something this massive. Maybe Alex can take a shot when he's 'recharged'."  
  
"Without the skilled teachings of his missing tutor, Alex could end up making things worse." He rubbed a soothing hand across his forehead, the burden of leadership making a dull, throbbing ache. "If that's even a possibility right now..." He walked forwards, grabbed a small, irregular piece of stone broken off from the battle and lobbed it towards the portal. It fell through the window, and disappeared as the energies consumed it, taking it far beyond their comprehension. "Mother, have this thing cordoned off, and pull some of your defensive drones from the battlements to guard this thing at all times. Even if it burps, let me know." The sentience did not answer, distracted and looking away, scanning several electronic eyes across the damaged courtyard, having been cleaned of the bodies less than an hour ago. "Mother?"  
  
"Yes...?" She whirled around, obviously preoccupied, a rare instance indeed in the fact her very personality is controlled by a sophisticated computer program, usually unallowing for such human frailties as simple distraction. The holographic form blinked her eyes, and steadied herself. "My apologies...with my core programming compromised, I am having...trouble."  
  
Brooklyn wandered off, towards the castle edge. "Aren't we all."  
  
Lexington disengaged himself from the computer equipment, as Mother set into motion her given orders and looked away again, quickly powering off the hologram, and vanishing her presence from the courtyard. Passing the sentience's odd behavior off as another glitch in her damaged computer banks to be fixed shortly, he followed his brother to the outlining parapets, a broken, jagged edge shattered by weaponry and opened near-dangerously into the city. Throwing himself onto embankment, a hunched, vulture-like posture, he stared to where Brooklyn did, the darkened chasm in their city now lit and aflame by massive, roaming searchlights, and a thousand twinkling lights spread out to each denote a rescue worker sifting meticulously through the wreckage. "We won." he whispered, his eyes lifting into the clearing horizon, the coming sunlight slowly breeding a contrast between land and sky. "That has to count for something."  
  
"A hollow victory, against a physical force, something we can punch and shoot and claw." Brooklyn responded, looking tired, and true to his age. "I remember staring into the eyes of the man Annika fought against in the surgical bay, he was the last to die. It was hatred, pure and simple. That kind of abhorrence can't be beaten, Lex. It's seated too deep, it's become part of the evolution of any sentient species. Half will always love, half will always hate." His hands traced the damaged parapet, the foundation scorched and crumbled. "And that latter half becomes more dangerous with every generation, and each new recruit to a same old cause. Protection by extinction, and an assurance of life by another's death."  
  
"Goliath never believed that."  
  
"Goliath isn't here." said Brooklyn hardheartedly. "He's lost, out there somewhere, by an instrument of such pain and war. His wife, and his goddamned baby daughter, all of them floating through every conceivable moment in time."  
  
"They'll make it like you did," Lexington maintained, a slim hope the best they all had for their true leader's return, "they'll come home."  
  
Eyes that saw the very best and worst of past and future settled to his devastated home below, suffering from a wound so very tolling. The first rays of light were leaching across the horizon through the dissolving clouds, a welcome end to a very enduring, and costly night. "It's almost dawn, let's get inside." He pushed away from the edge and turned inside. "We all need rest. With the Guild knowing of our home, and Sobek's disappearance, our lives just got a little more complicated." Lexington strolled past him, collecting his computer equipment and watching as a few iron sentinels relieved themselves from their posts surrounding the castle periphery to take their place around the portal, the Steel Clan guarding the opened hole in time. Brooklyn took one final look to the distant sky, the angular echelon fashioned by the humans' towers flooding against a lavender sky, and a singular point of point expanding slowly outwards to claim its place. "They'll come home," he whispered, echoing Lexington's heartfelt assertion, "they have to."  
  
He strode inside, new leader to his brood, and dreaded what duties now lie ahead.  
  
****************************************  
  
The city was close to light, so close to touch and revel within the warmth of the sun after a night none would ever forget, and to begin the search for those lost in the great chasm in Manhattan under the assuring light of day. From his vantage point, he was lucky enough to behold what others could never imagine, to not just watch the sky alight with fire, of orange and red and orchid, but to stroke the very flames of heaven himself. And he thought to himself, what a bitter indulgence.  
  
Xanatos watched from his great office window the sky lighten towards the perpetual cycle of day, his face hidden behind his joined hands and etched like marble, agonizingly petrified, and no discernible emotion placed forth to even hazard a guess to what he kept inside of him.  
  
"...and still searchers sift through the rubble with the coming light of dawn..." a background murmur heeded any and all attention with a now stale but nonetheless catching headline. "...the clock slowly running out on any survivors who may be trapped beneath the crumbled buildings..."  
  
With the lure of the reporter's voice, he swiveled his chair towards the monitor screen, holding a continuous stream of news reports. Each station boasted a running toll on the rising body count, steadily mounting towards a thousand with so many people caught unawares and unable to be evacuated in time. Millions of dollars in property damage, buildings ruined and reduce to broken piles of composite construction materials, from businesses unrivaled and homes made warm by the presence of families to smoldering ash.  
  
"...One can only guess what these creatures were that trampled entire buildings and killed so many..." one reporter continued, on location in the chasm as it was so named by the news stations, a flurry of activity behind him as rescue workers pulled both survivors and bodies from the rubble. "...but whether a terrorist attack or a just the beginning of a greater threat, our unified spirit shall not be crushed..."  
  
"Human audacity." another voice intruded upon the television score, booming an echo into the spacious office, dripping, and oozing with a malicious streak. "To truly make a species appear larger than it actually is, is the greatest delusion of evolution." Xanatos turned slightly, to see his private door open and allow into his chamber his so-called business partner. Hulking, he emerged into the billionaire's sight, and smiling, in all likelihood enjoying every aspect of this new working relationship. "Well, what an interesting night."  
  
Xanatos lowered his hands to his desk, a rigid facade holding back the hatred of this creature he had allied himself with. "Interesting is not a word I would readily use."  
  
"Your son is powerful." continued the being, strolling through this hub of power for the intercontinental conglomerate of Xanatos Enterprises, basking in the darkened shadows and seeing collected treasures from around the globe proudly displayed under shafts of light projected from the ceiling. "Beyond what I could ever imagine."  
  
"He's a focal point, of two races soon to become three." It seemed more a boast than an explanation, to better ensure this creature fondling his displayed artifacts would know just what his son was capable of. "A convergence no one has ever seen before."  
  
The being moved forwards. "How unfortunate for you then," a face materialized into what dim light existed, the pallid, skeletal features of Sobek, "that I ended up linked to him." He watched the human tense, and scrape his nails over the expensive finish of his oak desk as he balled his hands into fists. "His fay heritage attracted the bonding aspect of the immortality spell like a magnet, binding us together for an eternity."  
  
"It will not be so long, I assure you." the billionaire vowed.  
  
"He'll live forever. Is that not what every father wants for his child, to be spared injury and death?" Sobek inquired, though inscrutably wicked in a jest that modeled his bony facial plates into a smile. "You should be proud, for Alexander is quite potent, and perceptive, he even merged with Goliath to spare himself any damage or pain through our link." He released a steadying breath, his body not fully healed by the merciless beating taken by Goliath imbued with Alexander's power. "I wonder if the boy even knew, that he would die himself if indeed Goliath had utilized his true and full potential to destroy me, the little brat..."  
  
"I make meticulous preparations, I risk my place with the clan to open a window for your arrival, I even have to deal with three hundred armored racists storming the castle battlements, and you venture all of it and waste your time screwing around with Goliath for your trivial game."  
  
"I wanted to play."  
  
"I made this deal to save Fox's life, not to allow you to unleash your magical creatures into Manhattan and rip a massive gorge into my city!"  
  
"A diversion was needed."  
  
Xanatos was even now surprised at just how deeply Sobek's malevolence was seated. "You killed hundreds of people for a damned diversion?!!"  
  
He backed away from the desk, trawling through the office and running his bone-tipped talons across a war-beaten shield from a Greek ancestry. "I've never been one for subtlety." he droned. "It was simple enough to disguise my true reason for coming back to New York as just another psychotic rampage for revenge, instead of the fact I had come mostly to meet with you. What better way to distract then to play single-mindedly into the role most expected of you."  
  
"You almost ruined everything!" Xanatos yelled out, his voice rising like his blood pressure, Sobek's indifference serving to unhinge the always perfectly composed. He stood from his desk, and stared down the mutation daring to travel the length of his office so casually. "You nearly exposed me, and our covenant!"  
  
"Yes, I do apologize for getting carried away, but the battle with Goliath was the most fun I've had in a very long time." Sobek hummed, running a cautious finger across a blade's edge, gilded and bejeweled, a weapon of war now a remnant of a distant campaign. "The fact I will destroy everything Goliath holds dear has simply been altered in its approach. I had hoped I could eat his clan before his very eyes in my retribution of his constant victories, but allowing him to be welcomed home the rigid flesh of his clan decomposing under a full moon will have to suffice." He replaced the blade to its display stand within the shaft of light, and headed back towards Xanatos. "I truly hope he survives his odyssey though...so he may witness my ascension beyond mortal flesh," a long, serpentine tongue licked across his teeth, savoring the flavor of one, certain human, "and the evisceration of his wife."  
  
"You're psychotic."  
  
"Perhaps. Now, to business." His eyes sparked yellow, his tone become gravely serious. "The stones."  
  
Xanatos sighed, under Sobek's heel, and for the first time, the submissive in a business deal that would mean his family's lives. "I'll find them for you."  
  
"Yes, you will." The massive, bone-plated creature rested both hands to the oak desk, garnering a creak from the substantial weight, and leered at the billionaire. "Or your precious wife and child will suffer grievously. Alexander through our link, and Fox...through her sickness." He noticed the human's features pale, Grecian skin a dark tawny brew become a whitened shade of ocher, as Xanatos relented, and fell back into his leather throne, his Achilles heel lethally exploited. "A rare form of Septicemia, an invasion of her bloodstream so virulent, so merciless, even your resident miracle performing doctor cannot cure her. Who could ever imagine a mixture of my own mutated blood would react so...favorably with hers, tainted with that of Avalon magic."  
  
Xanatos slumped deeper into the padded folds and seams of his chair, a true revulsion at being anyone's lapdog, let alone a psychotic who held him entirely at his mercy and whim. His wife and lover, his only parallel, hanging by a delicate thread looped to Sobek's talontip.  
  
"Only I can cure her, only I can ease her suffering." he hissed, his breath much like the desert winds, hot, and vindictive. "And as such, you are my puppet, Mr. Xanatos, I hold your strings and those to every resource of your empire. And if you do anything to jeopardize what I seek, if you leak my presence here to the clan, to anyone, she will most assuredly die."  
  
"I won't let you destroy this clan." he warned, a last card to place. "Even if it means sacrificing Fox's life."  
  
The smile burst, and lay proverbially suspended from ear to ear. "Oh, but I'M not going to destroy the clan, or the rest of humanity, Mr. Xanatos...YOU ARE. Clan Wyvern shall burn through your hands alone." He retreated back into the shadows from whence he came, using the private door leading into a hidden sanctum, known only to a select few, to prepare for the coming of day. "Remember," the fading voice reminded, "I own you."  
  
Left alone and silhouetted by the rising peak of morning sun, the exhaustion, the duplicity, the very sacrifice of his soul at last caught up to him as he buried his face into his hands. And for perhaps the first time in his life, David Xanatos shed a tear.  
  
  
To be continued?  
That of course is entirely up to you...the reader. 


End file.
